[CLASS Connections TITLE] French Cinema and Society HOME | SYLLABUS | STUDENTS | SCHEDULE | MATERIALS | FORUM | LINKS COURSE MATERIALS ³Somebody was asking the other day what the difference was between French and American films. American films are about plots, I said, and French films are about people. You can usually tell where a plot is heading, but a person, now - a person will fool you.² (Roger Ebert) FILMS TO BE SCREENED: 1. Mondo - Tony Gatlif, 1996 : Mondo, the world child in today's multi-ethnic France. 2. Western - Manuel Poirier, 1997: Two men wander through Brittany in search of women and meaning; a road movie that is both funny and tragic. 3. The Last Metro, 1980 - François Truffaut's rather facile representation of Occupation embodied by the two leading stars of the day. 4. Story of Women (Une Affaire de femmes) - Chabrol, 1988: the efforts of a French woman to bring up her two children during German occupation. 5. Chocolat - Claire Denis, 1990 : A little girl memory of French Cameroon. 6. Overseas (Outremer) - Brigitte Roüan, 1992 : French Algeria (before Independence) seen through the eyes of three sisters. 7. May Fools (Milou en mai) - Louis Malle, 1989 : May 68 seen from the provinces as well as look at the values of "la France profonde" 8. Too Beautiful For You - Bertrand Blier, 1988 : Questioning social conventions, hypocrisy, taboos and moral rules of life in society. 9. French Twist (Gazon maudit) - Josiane Balasko, 1995 : a filmmaker who dares talk about lesbianism. 10. Bye Bye - Karim Dridi, 1995: A compelling look at Arabs struggling to raise their French-born children in a country that shuns them. 11. L. 627 - B. Tavernier, 1992: The story of a dedicated narcotics cop torn by his love for his loyal wife and his mistress, an addicted hooker. 12. La Promesse - J.-P. and L. Dardenne, 1996 : From neighboring Belgium, a quasi documentary look at racism and xenophobia and a promise. 13. The Closet (Le Placard) - Francis Veber, 2000 : how one man's life changes once people change their perception of him. 14. Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves), 1992 - Cyril Collard's controversial solo film on AIDS and Arab anti-racism, seen as the portrait of a generation. The Dream Life of Angels (La vie rêvée des anges) - Erick Zonka, 1998 : a very French look at the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. Tatie Danielle [3441] - Etienne Chatiliez, 1990 : The story - and study of behavior - of a nasty granny or how do deal with your old folks. ---------------------------------------------- AN ATTEMPT AT A THEMATIC APPROACH: - Multi-ethnic France Mondo (Tony Gatlif) Western (Manuel Poirier) - Memories of War The Last Metro (François Truffaut) Story of Women (Claude Chabrol) - Colonial Remembrance Chocolat (Claire Denis) Overseas (Brigitte Roüan) - May 68 May Fools (Louis Malle) - Men vs. women or Love French Style Too Beautiful For You! (Bertrand Blier) French Twist (Josiane Balasko) The Closet (Francis Veber) - Societal Problems L. 627 (Bertrand Tavernier) Bye Bye (Karim Dridi) La Promesse (Dardenne Brothers) Savage Nights (Cyril Collard) ---------------------------------------------- HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Republican France (1880-1981) 1880 -1910: Separation of Church and State in 1905 Expansion of colonialism 1914 -1918 First World War. France is destroyed 1936 -1938 Goverment of the Popular Front: First socialist regime 1939 -1945 World War II: France is occupied by Hitler¹s armies 1940 France defeated by Germany and divided into northern zone and a free southern zone governed by the Vichy régime of Pétain The Last Metro (Le dernier métro) Story of Women (Une affaire de femmes) 1946 -1958 Instauration of the IVth Republic 1958 Institution of the Vth Republic by General De Gaulle. Period of reconstruction. Independence of several French colonies Chocolat 1954 - 1962 War of independence in Algeria Overseas (Outremer) 1968 ³May events²: Revolt of students and general strike by workers May Fools (Milou en mai) 1969 De Gaulle resigns. Georges Pompidou is elected President 1974 Death of Pompidou. Valéry Giscard d¹Estaing is elected President Contemporary Period (1981 to present) 1981 François Mitterand is elected President of Socialist Regime 1986 National elections: Victory of the Right. Government of Jacques Chirac > First ³cohabitation² 1988 Presidential elections: Mitterand is reelected President 1993 National elections: 2nd victory of the Right > 2nd cohabitation 1995 Presidential elections: Jacques Chirac elected President 2002 Chirac is reelected President (for a 5-year term) : Victory of the Right, after scary upsurge of Right extremists who voted for presidential contestant, Le Pen. ---------------------------------------------- A Brief Review of French History Europe at the Eve of World War I In 1914, at the eve of World War I, Europe counted five major powers, Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. France and Great Britain were democratic and liberal powers, while Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were three authoritarian empires. More importantly perhaps, the five great European powers were at a different stage of economic development. Russia and Austria-Hungary were just beginning to modernize with few important cities, a mostly rural population and an underdeveloped railroad system. France, conversely, had a modern industry, a very good railroad system, and a solid currency. On the negative side, France still had a large rural population. England and Germany were great producers of coal, iron and steel; they had a superb fleet, an excellent banking system, but Germany was ahead and threatening to become the first industrial power in Europe. Soon the Great War of 1914-1918 was going to erupt and become the first World Conflict. A Conflict Brooding Since 1905 war was brooding in the Balkans, with the growing Yugoslav nationalism, increasing tension between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and the formations of blocks of coalitions such as the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia and England (eventually). As these blocks were forming, the tension between them increased and led them to engage into an arms race. In 1913, France increased the length of military service to three years, while Germany increased its army, all the more because it was afraid of Russia's power, which was on the side of France. So William II of Germany, who had long wanted peace, had to change his mind, saying, "war is unavoidable and necessary" and "if we don't strike first, our situation will become worse." Peace was therefore hanging by a thin thread. On June 28,1914, a Bosnian nationalist student assassinated the Archduke Francis-Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife in the streets of Sarajevo in Bosnia. The Austro-Hungarian government immediately sent an ultimatum to Serbia, but Serbia ignored it, so Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, thinking that it was a wonderful opportunity to eliminate Serbia from the political scene of the Balkans. Germany approved the move, thinking that Russia would not intervene, considering that it was hardly recovering from its 1905 Revolution. Poincaré, the French President of the Republic, promised France's assistance to the Czar, and Russia in turn promised its assistance to Serbia. On July 28,1914, the Austro-Hungarian forces attacked Serbia. Soon most of Europe was engulfed in a bloody war that would kill ten million men by its end in 1918. It was Austria, Hungary and Germany against Serbia, France, Britain and Russia. Russia mobilized on 30 July, 1914, Germany declared war on August 1 and the same day France mobilized and, on August 3, Germany after entering Luxembourg and Belgium declared war on France. On August 4 England went to war. Nationalist feelings on all parts were at their highest pitch and in France nationalism was fanned by the writings of Maurras and Barrès. The French wanted to recover Alsace and Lorraine and take their revenge for their defeat of 1870. In spite of some partisans of peace on each side, people resigned themselves to war as something inevitable. The War The Germans were ready, but France and its allies less. So Russia had many men, but their armaments were old-fashioned and mobilization was slow. England had no compulsory military service and therefore could only send a small expeditionary force. Under these conditions, France confronted the brunt of the German offensive and, unfortunately, its army and armaments were archaic. The men still wore terribly visible uniforms, red caps and pants, which made them easy targets for the Germans. The German troops swiftly went around the French army and moved toward Paris. The situation was critical. Half a million Parisians left the capital and the French government moved to Bordeaux. The French troops, under the high command of Joseph Joffre, held the front on the river Marne, and on September 10 even forced the Germans to fall back. But then began a very harsh, devastating period of trench warfare, with the use of gas, which by 1915 brought the number of French dead to 400,000 and 600,000 wounded. At the end of 1915 both sides were resigned to a continued war of attrition, but the Germans launched a powerful offensive against Verdun on February 21, 1916. The resistance of Verdun was fierce and by the end of 1916 the Germans were back where they had started. The soldiers on both sides were getting tired, and the only thing the governments could do to maintain morale was to use propaganda. The German press was saying that their troops were about to march on Paris, while the French press exploited the valiant resistance of Verdun. But then, as some pacifist movements were beginning to grow, the United States entered the war, on April 2, 1917. If the French troops were exhausted, Clemenceau, President of the Council (Président du Conseil) incarnated the spirit of resistance. He kept claiming that "In internal politics as well as in foreign politics, my formula is the same: 'Je fais la guerre, je fais toujours la guerre' (I am fighting the war, I am always fighting the war). From February to June the war continued to rage around Verdun with the French troops under Général Pétain's command. In France it was a time of great political instability with rapidly changing governments and with the Socialists asking for the end of the war. In Russia the Revolution began and since Russia was too busy with its revolution, the Germans were able to withdraw troops from the Russian front. In spite of its renewed strength, the German army was also exhausted and it was held back in Champagne. The arrival of one million fresh American troops suddenly gave the French an overwhelming superiority, so Ludendorff saw that the German position was hopeless and resigned. The emperor William II at first refused to end the fighting, but strikes and revolts broke out, and the allies of the Germans were making separate armistices with the French and their allies, so the Kaiser finally abdicated and fled. The Republic was proclaimed in Berlin and the new government accepted an armistice on November 11, 1918. It was celebrated on both sides with great relief and joy. Peace followed with the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919. According to this treaty, France recovered Alsace and Lorraine and Germany had to pay a hefty financial war reparation. Resentment against the conditions of the Versailles treaty grew at once in Germany, and with the economic crisis, Fascism emerged. In France the price of victory was staggeringly high: almost one and a half million dead, three million wounded and many of them severely maimed. France had lost so many men that its birthrate fell sharply and foreign workers had to be hired to make up for the loss of the three million French workers. French finances had been seriously depleted and prices soared. The only winners to an extent were the farmers, whose farm prices increased, but mechanization was still very rare and farmers still used horses and teams of oxen to do their farm work. But at least the war was over and the humiliating defeat inflicted by Germany on France in 1870 was avenged. France seemed to have regained some of its hegemony in Europe, but for this situation to last, France had to receive continued help from its allies, Russia had to remain isolated and Germany needed to be kept weak. However, Germany was to come out of the war stronger than France, and it would not be long before it tried again to defeat France and dominate Europe. In the meantime, Fascism was progressing fast and economic depressions and inflation fanned its rise in Italy with Mussolini, in Spain with the "Caudillo" Franco, and in Germany with Hitler and his Nazi party. France after World War l The French had put aside their political and social divisions during the war, but as soon as peace was signed the conflicts resumed between Socialists and Communists and the Right and Extreme Right parties. The opposition was made worse by their differences in matter of religion. The Left was traditionally anticlerical, while the Right was in favor of reestablishing relations with the Vatican. In addition the example of the Russian Revolution gave rise to movements of protest among workers who were joining trade unions. The legislative elections of November 1919 brought a coalition of the Right and Center called the National Bloc and the Horizon-Blue Chamber (La Chambre bleu horizon), with Raymond Poincaré and Aristide Briand. The Bloc National was really a nationalistic and pro-Catholic alliance promoted by the Church and Big Business and represented in the press by the extreme-rightist newspaper L'Action Française. However, France's economy was declining, the franc was losing much of its value due to the inflation, unemployment reappeared and multiple strikes took place at the end of 1919 and in 1920. Public opinion was divided. There seemed only one solution to the worsening financial situation of France: make the Germans pay their war debt! So in 1922 Raymond Poincaré received the specific mandate to make the Germans pay up because they had so far craftily delayed and postponed their payment. But the Germans soon proved incapable of paying, even after having their debt reduced thanks to an American mediation. Raymond Poincaré fell in 1924 and was replaced by a coalition of Radicals and Socialists named the Cartel des Gauches. The current President of the Republic, Millerand, who belonged to the Bloc National, had to resign, and he was replaced by a moderate Republican, Gaston Doumergue, while a Radical, Edouard Herriot, became Premier. Unfortunately the financial situation of France was getting worse, the franc slid further down and prices soared. Herriot, when he saw that he could not count on Germany's payment of its war debt, raised taxes and cut government spending. But it was too little a remedy. Herriot resigned in April 1925, and so the only savior in sight was Poincaré, who returned as President du Conseil in July 1926. Poincaré's efforts following the last measures of Herriot redressed the situation. French industry started to grow, and by 1930 it would be 40% above its pre-World War I level, thanks particularly to the development of the automobile, of petro-chemical and electrical industries. Workers' salaries were low, but they obtained a reduction in work time to only eight hours per day. Women were also making progress in the work place, in industry and offices; however, they still did not have the right to vote. Exports improved too, but in 1929 an ill Poincaré resigned. A series of Center-Right governments followed and while France was enjoying prosperity in almost a state of euphoria, a terrible crisis was brewing. A Terrible Crisis In October 1929, Thursday, October 24, exactly, now known as Black Thursday, the New York Stock Market crashed and did not recover. In fact the crisis hit the whole world, with perhaps the exception of Russia. At first an international crisis, it soon turned into a world economic and social catastrophe. Unemployment grew and social as well as racial tensions grew. In Germany, the Nazis gained 107 seats in the Reichstag in 1930, then 250 seats. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany by Hindenburg. On March 23, 1933, Hitler obtained full powers. Then on August 2, 1934, when Hindenburg died, Hitler became both President and Chancellor under the title of Reichsfahrer: He was the absolute master of Germany, in fact a full-fledged dictator supported by the gigantic organization of the Waffen S.S. and Himmler's "Gestapo" (Geheime Stoats Polizei). As Hitler was taking power, France's unemployment reached 1.3 million. The French economy was on a downslide and the nation's deficit growing. French governments fell one after another. There were to be forty-two governments in the interwar period, each one lasting no more than six months, and nobody knew how to put an end to the crisis. And then the Stavinsky scandal exploded: It was a financial scandal that ended with Serge Stavinsky's death (suicide or murder) in December 1933. Stavinsky was a plain swindler with protectors in high places. He issued large amounts of bonds with the minimal (not to say nonexistent) warranty of the Bayonne Municipal Pawnshop. The French, exasperated by the economic situation, used the Stavinsky scandal as an outlet for their frustration and anger. The Royalists of the Action Française encouraged a group of thugs to create confusion and to beat up Communists and Radicals. There was also the fascist Croix de Feu organization, a pseudo-Nazi association that organized anti-government riots. The Left faction of the government fought back, and as these two factions were at odds, France seemed close to a revolution. The worse was fortunately averted thanks to a leftist coalition that led the Popular Front to victory, a coalition of Communists, Radical-Socialists with the backing of the C.G.T. union,'in May 1936 with Léon Blum as its leader. Blum came to power under very difficult circumstances because the French had hoped for social progress and wanted more welfare, a more equal distribution of wealth‹ and they strengthened their demands with strikes. Léon Blum, unfortunately, was not able to realize the deep economic and financial reforms that were expected of him, and in 1936 the government had to devaluate the franc. In March 1937 Blum had to announce that he had to delay the promised and expected reforms. In France Blum was also confronted by the rise of secret organizations such as La Cagoule, and the Comité Secret d'Action Révolutionnaire (The secret committee of revolutionary action). Outside of France, Blum had to deal with the rise to power of Hitler, Mussolini and the Spanish Red Terror. Too few people supported Blum's policy and many did not want to pay more taxes to pay for the promised social services or to prepare for war. Blum was aware of the perilous international situation and wanted to start a rearmament program, but when he and his Popular Front asked the French to subscribe to national defense loans, many chose to take their money outside of France. The failure of Blum marked the end of the Popular Front in 1937 and many Frenchmen were heard crying: "Better Hitler than Blum!" France's Decline at the Eve of World War 11 Blum was replaced by Edouard Daladier, who chose Paul Raynaud as his minister of finances, who favored drastic fiscal measures, with new taxes and budgetary economies. In spite of some gains in industrial production, the economic situation of France remained bad, and to make things worse, France was experiencing a steep decline in its demography. From 1921 to 1936 the country had only gained two million inhabitants and in 1936 France still had to count on 2,200,000 foreign workers. There were more deaths than births and the French population was getting older, a dangerous trend for the future of the nation. 1938-1939 From 1938 on Europe began to be more and more at the mercy of Hitler's ambitions. The Führer was conscious that no one could seriously oppose him and that the time was ripe for carrying out his grand design of a powerful and supreme greater Germany. France and Britain wanted peace and people either did not see, or rather did not want to see, the menace of Nazi Germany. In France, people were mostly preoccupied by their social concerns and by their fear of Communism. Furthermore, part of the French people favored an alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. No one even blinked an eye when Hitler assumed the command of the German armed forces (February 4, 1938). Even the frightening moves of Hitler did not stir a patriotic nerve in France. The Ansch1uss of February-March 1938 or occupation of Austria by the Germans was not met by any reaction in Europe. So Hitler felt that he had a green light to pursue his conquests. He next sought to take Czechoslovakia. On September 12, 1938, Hitler, in a particularly violent speech, accused the Czechs of torturing the German minorities on their soil. Czechoslovakia was an ally of France and so when Czechoslovakia mobilized, France followed. The Grand Illusion of Peace Chamberlain in the name of England, and Daladier for France, wanted desperately to avoid a war, so they suggested a meeting in Munich with Mussolini and the Fürher. Hitler managed to throw powder in the eyes of the French and British, who accepted his demands. They thought that by giving in to Hitler they had served the cause of peace, but in fact it was at the expense of Czechoslovakia, which was not present at the conference. Nevertheless, when Daladier returned to Paris he was acclaimed as a savior of peace. The French were relieved and repeated "La Paix! La Paix! C'est la Paix! Nous allons vivre. Nous allons donc vivre encore" (Peace, Peace, it is peace. We are going to live. We are going to live again). In England Chamberlain, upon his return from Munich, declared: "It is Peace for Our Time" and received a hysterical welcome. They and their countries were soon to pay dearly for this cowardly act and for the two men's blind confidence in Hitler's words. So Hitler had the green light. Now he was looking at Poland and in fact wanted to invade it, and with this in mind he concluded a pact of non-aggression with Russia (August 23,1939). Hitler's hands were free to attack Poland and it is exactly what he did without warning on September 1, 1939. This time France and England could not back off. On September 3, 1939, France and England declared war on Germany. The dream of peace turned into a horrible nightmare. The Second World War (1939-1945) Following the invasion of Poland, the French first remained on the defensive along the Maginot Line that they thought the Germans could never cross. The fact was that the morale of the French army was low, their armament antiquated and they had practically no aviation and few tanks. Unfortunately the famous Ligne Maginot, strong as it was, did not extend all the way to the sea, and so the Germans avoided this line of French defense, going around it. Rapidly, the German forces, which were well equipped and enthusiastic, invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and in front of their overwhelming superiority French troops kept retreating on roads which were already crowded with retreating civilians who prevented the movement of allied troops. The Germans moved swiftly toward Paris and entered the capital without firing a shot. By June 12, 1940, Maréchal Weygand proposed an armistice to preserve the honor of the army, and by June 16 Paul Reynaud, who wanted to continue the fight, resigned, in fact pushed out by a coup d'état headed by Pierre Laval. The President of the Republic then called Maréchal Pétain, who by June 17 announced his intention to ask for an armistice. The armistice was signed on June 22 in Compiègne, a place chosen by Hitler because it was in Compiègne that the November 11,1918, Armistice had been signed by the defeated Germans. The conditions of surrender for France were severe. Germany was to occupy the upper three-fourths of France and the two million French prisoners would not be freed. On October 22, 1940, Pétain met Hitler in Montoire and shook hand with him, a symbol of the collaboration of the Vichy government with Germany. Pétain and his cohorts as well as many Frenchmen were not unhappy to bring to an end the war, thinking that it could be the beginning of a great Franco-German alliance. In fact many thought that the brand of German totalitarianism could be beneficial for France. The French, it is true, were on the verge of despair and confused, so they thought that Pétain was right and they sang "Maréchal, nous voilà!" (Maréchal, here we are) thinking only a day at a time, hoping to continue to live while blanking out the real situation, blinding themselves to the past, the present and future. Pétain immediately initiated a government called L'Etat Francais, in Vichy, with the motto "Travail, Famille, Patrie" (Work, family, Fatherland). A government based on moral order and on the basic values of the land. Général de Gaulle, in the meantime, had fled to England instead of submitting to the new collaborationist régime of Pétain. From London, on June 18, 1940, the Général made a famous broadcast begging the French not to accept the armistice and to resist the Germans, either by joining him in England or by organizing a Resistance in France.196 De Gaulle's task was not made easy because the Allies took a very long time in recognizing the General's provisional government, and the United States was still naively hoping that Vichy would abandon its collaboration with Germany. In fact, it was not until August 1944 that the USA, Great Britain and Russia recognized de Gaulle's French Committee of National Liberation. From the Somber Years of Vichy to Victory (1940-1945) Contrary to the Allies' expectations, the Vichy government, in the illusory hope of preserving a small amount of French sovereignty, collaborated fully with the Germans. It sent French workers to German plants under the label of STO or Service du Travail Obligatoire (compulsory work service), it tracked down and arrested Resistance fighters and Jews, and sent them to death camps in Germany. Vichy also sent French units to the Russian front to fight along with the Nazis. Both Pétain and Laval claimed that they collaborated with the Germans in order to pacify them and to save France from more severe treatment at German hands. There was unfortunately a deeper reason for the collaboration: they were quite convinced that the future of France was in a friendly association with Hitler's Germany, integrated within the Fürher's conception of a new Europe. And, hard as it is to admit, there were more French collaborators and Nazis than one would have imagined, people like Brasillac, Doriot, Darnand who created the Milice, a French Gestapo-type police at the service of the Nazis, Céline, Drieu de La Rochelle, etc.... The trial of Klaus Barbie and the trial of Papon (1997-1998) have opened many eyes today, uncovering the extent of the collaboration by the French and many ugly acts performed against their own countrymen. Fortunately, on the other hand, many Frenchmen refused to side with Vichy and continued to fight the enemy: they were the Resistance, the Free French, the Maquisards, so named because they were hiding in the mountains and in the forests. Following de Gaulle's call, those soldiers and other Frenchmen who escaped to England gathered around the General under their symbol, the Croix de Lorraine (Cross of Lorraine) at the side of Winston Churchill and his countrymen. Inside France, the brave Maquisards, under the leadership of Jean Moulin, harassed the Germans, blew up railroads, killed Germans, gave London important information about German troop movements, about the location of ammunitions depots, and tanks. They blew up bridges, helped Jews to escape and rescued allied airmen who were shot down over France. At the time of the Normandy invasion, the Maquisards were extremely helpful attacking and harassing the Germans from behind. Many of these young men and women were unfortunately caught, tortured and put to death. Jean Moulin himself was caught by the infamous Klaus Barbie, rightfully called the Butcher of Lyon. However, in 1943 the balance of power began to shift. The German war machine was out of steam while the war effort of the Allies increased. The Germans, however, had transformed Europe into a gigantic fortress with defenses, walls and pillboxes all around the French coasts, and in-deed it took two full years of intense fighting to break the fortress. While Stalin kept many Nazi divisions busy in Russia, the Anglo-Americans put general Eisenhower in charge of a major landing in Normandy. The inva-sion took place during the night of June 5-6, 1944, with thousands of ships, and men. In the meantime another landing had taken place in Provence and the tanks of the French general Leclerc were pushing in the direction of Paris, that had risen against the Germans (August 19-25). The Germans could only retreat toward the northeast, but by September 15,1944, most of France and Belgium were free. As they retreated toward Germany, the Nazis fought desperately, particularly in the Ardennes, the Vosges and in Alsace.'But finally, at the beginning of 1945, the Allies were able to undertake the final assault, the French from the west and the Russians from the east. Berlin fell to the Russians on April 19, and Hitler and his henchman Goebbels committed suicide: May 2, 1945, the Germans were at long last brought to their knees, and forced to sign their capitulation in Reims on May 7, 1945. The Aftermath of World War II The year 1945 found France and the whole world deeply affected by the war. In five years over fifty million men had perished and large portions of France, Germany, Poland and Russia had been devastated and their economies shattered. Following the Liberation, the French had found their will to live again, but they still needed to purge themselves from the evil acts perpetrated by some Frenchmen during the occupation under Vichy. So immediately after the end of the war, a period of épuration (cleansing) took place. Hundreds, even thousands of men and women, members of the Milice, officials of Pétain's Legion, informers, traitors, profiteers of all kinds, were summarily executed. Women who had been seen fraternizing with German soldiers had their heads shaved and were spat upon. While some cases were justified, others were often due to personal revenge. It was estimated that up to 10,000 persons were put to death during this period, thousands jailed. Pétain and Laval were condemned to death, but de Gaulle commuted Pétain's sentence to life imprisonment. Then de Gaulle succeeded in establishing an interim Provisional government, including many members of the Resistance and two Communists. Right away all summary executions, street Iynchings were prohibited and the hectic hysteria of revenge was replaced by more orderly judicial procedures. De Gaulle also instituted reforms which had a lasting effecton France: he nationalized coal mines, airlines, the Renault automobile factory, electric and gas works, major insurance companies and many major banks. But France's economy, its industry, its towns had to be rebuilt. De Gaulle's task was enormous, but he thought that, in order to achieve France's recovery, it was first necessary to make a clean cut with the Third Republic. So he called for a referendum (plébiscite) and October 21, 1945, the French, with 96% of them approving, abolished the Third Republic. The Fourth Republic: 1946-1958 First of all it must be understood that the Fourth Republic inherited most of the troubles of the Third Republic. Nothing much had changed in the constitutional structure of the government, except that women for the first time were allowed to vote. In the elections for the new republic the Communists won 265 of the votes, while the MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire) trailed with 23% of the votes. The Socialists received 23% of the votes, while the Radicals and Moderates received less than 15%. The three major parties confirmed de Gaulle as head of the government, but on January 20, 1946, he voluntarily relinquished the presidency because he could not accept the stricter controls the govern-ment wanted to impose on him. Some believe that he sought a more massive call from the country. With de Gaulle gone, the task of governing and working on the country's recovery fell on the shoulders of the major-ity parties. The Assembly replaced de Gaulle with the Socialist Félix Gouin. They drafted a new constitution that was immediately voted down by 53% of the voters. So the Assembly dissolved itself and on June 2 a new assembly was elected with a marked gain by the MRP (over 22%) over the Communists (less than 21%) and the Socialists (about 16%). Georges Bidault, head of the MRP (Popular Republican Mouvement) became the leader of the new government. But there followed a period of incessant ministerial instability with twenty-four governments succeeding each other between December 1946 and May 1958. None of these governments lasted more than six months. Even after its victory France was exhausted. Its economy was stagnant or mixed at best. Destruction had choked every major sector of the economy: roads, railroads, harbors needed to be rebuilt, and there was a great shortage of coal. Inflation was high and food supplies were inad-equate because agriculture was slow in recovering from the loss in men and slow in modernizing. France was still terribly dependent on the aid of its allies, and whether it was admitted or not, France had placed herself under the umbrella of the United States, particularly when it accepted the Marshall Plan of economic recovery. Even with the Monnet plan that accepted the financial assistance of the United States, France was slow in modernizing its industry. Labor unrest persisted with major strikes in 1947, 1948 and 1950. Then internal problems were worsened by the situation in the colonial empire. In fact decolonization was gaining momentum with increasing demands for autonomy by North Africa, Madagascar and Indo-China. The Fourth Republic would prove impotent in containing the movement, and would finally collapse in the Algerian snare. However, the Fourth Republic was not without positive achievement: It organized social security, insurance protection for the family, national and regional planning. It also moved ahead with the modernization of France, even if slowly, and improved the living standard of its citizens. It was criticized to justify its demise. From the Fourth to the Fifth Republic Even though governments were falling and rising at a fast clip, progress was made in several important areas. Women received the right to vote and a comprehensive welfare state was established. Demography was on the rise again with up to 800,000 births a year. Between 1946 and 1985 the population grew from about 40 million to 55 million. Surely the guarantees of social services and family allowances were contributing factors to this splendid recovery. France was changing, slowly perhaps, but surely. It was no longer a country of peasants; it was becoming a nation of city dwellers and industrial workers. Thanks to those factors, France was moving toward a new era of economic, technological and industrial boom that was nicknamed Les Trente Glorieuses (The Thirty Glorious Ones). People started to live better, in more comfortable houses, with more modern conveniences (a refrigerator, a washing machine, modern kitchen appliances etc....). People were able to buy automobiles and because of this they were more mobile, took longer vacations, farther away from home. But, naturally, recovery did not proceed without problems. One major problem for France was the growing process of decolonization. France, of course, wanted to retain its colonial empire, but nationalism was growing within native populations, a fact the French government was a bit too slow to understand, and that the French settlers refused to face at first. So France was suddenly engaged in a terrible war in Vietnam (Indo-China). It was to be a long, costly war and in fact a real nightmare, which ended with the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1955 and the withdrawal of France. Mendès France who orchestrated the Geneva treaty with Vietnam, gave the Tunisians and Moroccans their independence in March 1956. Mendès France, was thereafter the subject of ceaseless anti-Semitic tirades accusing him of having abandoned France's empire. Mendès France did nothing for Algeria because France considered it a part of the metropolitan country. When Jacques Soustelle was appointed Gouvernor-General of Algeria, precisely to maintain Algeria as a part of France, he said: "We must not, at any price, in any way and under any pretext, lose Algeria." Immediately the Algerian nationalists who had formed the FLN (National Liberation Front) began a campaign of terrorism and uprisings that kept escalating. The French government began to pour men in Algeria in the hope of crushing the rebels, but it was in vain, and that sad period has left, to this very day, deep open wounds in France as well as in Algeria. As a matter of fact, the Algerian episode may be considered as one of the tragic events of twentieth-century history and its consequences still continue to haunt France and Algeria. In any case it brought down the Fourth Republic when the French government, afraid of a coup by settlers and paratroopers under the command of Général Salan, called back de Gaulle, who drafted a new constitution, thus burying the Fourth Republic and giving birth to the Fifth Republic. The Fifth Republic The new Constitution of 1958 gave vast powers to the President and to the Premier, while the Assembly's own powers were curtailed. This format corresponded exactly to de Gaulle's ambitions and, indeed, to many Frenchmen's desires. Both thought that a strong government was the only way to rebuild France and to finally bring the Algerian conflict to a close. In October 1958 de Gaulle offered the Algerian rebels a cease-fire, but the Algerians, then, refused to stop fighting. They imagined that they could stand firm on their claim of independence because, even after pour-ing large quantities of men in Algeria, France was not even close to a victory. De Gaulle saw no end to the conflict, and after several failed negotiations, he decided that France should grant Algeria its indepen-dence. It was done on April 11, 1961. Immediately, a group of support-ers of French Algeria, the OAS or Organisation de l'Armée Secrète attempted a coup against de Gaulle. Negotiations went on anyway, and finally an agreement was signed in Evian, by which France recognized the independence of Algeria. By June 1964 practically all the French troops had left Algeria. This marked the beginning of the end of France's colonial empire. De Gaulle had understood that France could no longer resist the pressures of colonial nationalism. Following Algeria's example, one after another of France's colonies declared their independence. After the Referendum of April 8, 1962, by which the French people ratified de Gaulle's settlement of the Algerian problem, de Gaulle made it clear that he alone exercised the executive power of the Republic. He subsequently replaced the Premier Debré by Georges Pompidou and started to implement a series of important political and economic reforms. On August 22, 1962, de Gaulle luckily escaped an assassination attempt by the OAS not far from Paris, at the Petit Clamart locality. After this failed attempt against his life, de Gaulle was able to push through a referendum proposing the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. There was strong opposition to this proposal by many politicians, but in the end de Gaulle¹s referendum was approved. At the Presidential elections of 1965, de Gaulle had to contend with another candidate on the ballot, Mitterand. But Mitterand was defeated and de Gaulle was reelected to another seven-year term on December 19, 1965. With this vote of confidence, de Gaulle felt that he could try and restore France's tarnished "grandeur." His first task was to work on the country's economy and on important issues of foreign policy. However, in 1968, de Gaulle was to face a very difficult period of social and political turmoil. Unrest started on the university campuses and spread, at least partially, to other sectors. This rebellion turned out to represent a deep conflict of generations, and from that time on, many traditional aspects of French society were rejected. Social conventions, family traditions, morality, dress, language even, music etc... were subjected to a complete and major revolution. The May 1968 Student-Worker Uprising In May 1968, a student uprising that soon became a student-worker uprising, rocked Gaullist France. Students, more and more frustrated by the poor conditions of universities, lack of contact with distant profes-sors, inadequate classrooms and, above all, the poor prospect of employ-ment after graduation, eagerly followed the call to revolt. Among their leaders was Cohn-Bendit or Danny le Rouge (the Red), who invited stu-dents and workers to set up barricades in the streets of Paris and to resist French police by throwing stones and molotov cocktails at the CRS. Confrontations became violent and many cars were upturned and burned. The police often reacted violently, however, to the surprise of all. There were only two deaths in the whole affair. Why the uprising? After years of war, occupation and apathy, the youth of France was seized by a remark-able excitement. They were fed up, they were weary of feeling useless, left aside by the older generation. At the same time they were bubbling with impatience to forge a new France, a new world for themselves. Most of their fathers still were anchored in the past, but they were concerned with their future. Their youthful impatience led to the events of May 1968. On May 13, 1968, the workers' unions declared a general strike in sympathy with the students, and over 750,000 students and workers marched through the French capital demanding major changes. The movement then spread to provinces, and before the end of May, France seemed ready for another major revolution. France was paralyzed for awhile: gasoline was scarce, banks were closed, students occupied university build-ings, no classes were taught. But after a record short speech of only three minutes on May 20, 1968, de Gaulle managed to quiet down the uprising and to pacify the strikers. Subsequently, half a million people paraded down the Champs Elysées in support of de Gaulle, chanting "De Gaulle does not stand alone!" It must be said that de Gaulle was helped in part by the Communists, who denounced the rebels as false revolutionaries and fascist provocateurs. So, almost by miracle, the strikes were over as suddenly as they had appeared. On May 29 the Communist party and the union CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) launched a powerful demonstration in Paris calling for a Popular Government. On that day de Gaulle was nowhere to be seen, and the reason was that without warning, de Gaulle had left for Baden-Baden in Germany, where Général Massu was in command of the French garrisons. To this day nobody can be sure exactly why de Gaulle left France for Germany. The most likely, according to Georges Pompidou and Général Massu's testimonies, is that de Gaulle wanted to get away from a situation that he could not correct. He perhaps even thought of going into exile. In any case General Massu apparently convinced de Gaulle to return to Paris. And indeed de Gaulle returned and immediately showed that he was back and ready to govern. On May 30, 1968, at 4:31 pm, de Gaulle announced the dissolution of the Assembly and called for calm and actions against anarchy. He asserted: "I will not retire! I will not replace my Prime Minister! I am dissolving the National Assembly!" On May 31, 1968, gasoline was flowing again and workers returned to work and the student protest died. In fact the student protest soon came under increasing criticism and the whole affair was finally forgotten. De Gaulle, it seemed, had won another victory. But not really! The May 1968 events had tarnished his image and weakened his authority. De Gaulle, perhaps as a gesture of strength, or perhaps to show his willingness to make changes, replaced his Premier, Georges Pompidou, even though he had coped well during the crisis. As if unaffected by de Gaulle's firing, Pompidou announced that he would be a candidate at the next presidential elections. Meanwhile, Pompidou was replaced by a pale bureaucrat, Maurice Couve de Murville, who had served de Gaulle as foreign minister since 1958. Edgar Faure was put in charge of reorganizing education. Everyone at this point expected gradual changes as an answer to the demands of the students. But suddenly, without waiting, de Gaulle decided to put his plan of reforms of the Senate and of regional administration to a referendum. It was a tremendous gamble, all the more when de Gaulle announced that he would resign if his projected reforms did not receive the support of the nation. People were stunned and, unfortunately for de Gaulle, 54% of the voters rejected his proposed reforms on April 27, 1969. De Gaulle was disappointed and perhaps even angry, so on April 28, 1969, de Gaulle resigned with these brief laconic words: "I am ceasing to exercise my functions as President of the Republic; this decision takes effect today at noon!" Immediately after these words, the General went home to Colombey-les-deux-églises, where he died 18 months later on November 9, 1970, while writing his memoirs. French Economy after the Second World War and under de Gaulle When de Gaulle took office, the economy of France was on the brink of collapse and the country was on the verge of financial crisis with rising prices, inflation and decreasing exports. De Gaulle and his then finance minister Antoine Pinay established a policy of austerity, increased taxes, reduced state expenditures and even devaluated the franc. In the long run the reforms brought about an improvement in the economy; France became a major industrial power giving its citizens access to many con-sumer goods such as automobiles, television, refrigerators, modern bathrooms and kitchens. In addition, the French had longer vacations with pay: three weeks in 1966 and four weeks in 1969. Supermarkets began to replace many small shops and people could buy food, appliances, furniture, hardware and even books under the same gigantic roof. France's face was changing fast and the traditional rural society of yore was growing into a consumer society with all its advantages and pitfalls. While the rich became richer, the poor grew poorer and the abyss between classes widened. One does not have to look further to find in these problems the roots of the May 1968 insurrection. De Gaulle's Foreign Policy De Gaulle's first priority was to restore France's former prestige in the world. Unfortunately following World war 11, France had fallen under the umbrella of the United States. De Gaulle resented this situation and wanted to become independent from the Americans. To achieve this, de Gaulle closed the NATO bases on French soil and asked that the SHAPE headquarters be moved out of the Loire to Belgium. To further insure France's independence, the President started an independent nuclear force (Force de Frappe = Striking Force). It is only recently, in 1996, that President Chirac announced that France would no longer pursue nuclear tests. This announcement came only after years of loud protests by the French South Pacific natives, the Japanese, the New Zealanders, Australians and many other nations. De Gaulle wanted a non-Atlantic Third Force, and with this in mind, he pursued vigorously the development of the Common Market with Germany. Fearing that Britain would favor the United States and thus become a rival to France's leadership in Europe, de Gaulle blocked Britain's entry into the Common Market. After De Gaulle Immediately after de Gaulle's resignation presidential elections took place and Georges Pompidou was elected President of the Republic. Pompidou had obtained a comfortable majority and was prepared to continue de Gaulle's program. However, Pompidou, a jovial, intelligent native of Auvergne, was more liberal, less intransigent than de Gaulle, and more diplomatic. As a testimony to this, Pompidou's first measure was to allow Britain's entry in the Common Market. But Pompidou was sick with leukemia which incapacitated him more and more.209 The Socialist-Communist coalition headed by Francois Mitterand exploited the situation and won a good number of seats in the Assembly in 1973, mostly by criticiz-ing the President's laissez-faire economic policies. According to the Left, Pompidou was responsible for letting France drift into the same reces sion, inflation and unemployment that plagued the rest of Europe at the time. Pompidou did not have the time to fight the crisis because he died suddenly of cancer on April 2, 1974.2 Immediately two candidates faced each other: The Socialist Francois Mitterand and his coalition with Communists and, representing the Right, the candidate of the Independent Republicans, Valerie Giscard d'Estaing. With the first round of votes, Mitterand appeared to be the favorite, but the second round went to Giscard d'Estaing, who received 50.8% of the votes. Mitterand nevertheless received 49.19% of the votes, which meant that Giscard had won by a very narrow margin of less than 1% of the votes. Under these conditions the presidency of Giscard d'Estaing was made somewhat uneasy with Mitterand standing close in the wings, so to speak, and the fact that Giscard was not the leader of the largest party in Parliament. Giscard d'Estaing, however, was full of confidence; he prom-ised the French a bright future and an advanced liberal society. With these goals in mind, Giscard introduced important tax reforms, lowered the voting age to 18 and was even open to the demands of ecologists. He also continued de Gaulle's nuclear program and supported the Common Market while entertaining friendly relations with Germany and the United States. Unfortunately, the President's hopes were shattered by the world recession and a severe OPEC oil crisis, both bringing inflation up (13.4% in 1979) and increased unemployment figures to 1.6 million (1979), representing 10% of the active population. With 900,000 unemployed work-ers, production and exports declined. In order to solve the crisis, Giscard decided to appoint a new Prime Minister. He thanked Chirac and called Raymond Barre to the task, asking him to deal with France's economy. Raymond Barre entered the arena with a great deal of energy, but his noble and honest efforts were unable to stop the rising unemployment (1.7 million in 1981) and inflation increased to 12%. Barre tried to stop the country's dependence on crude oil by speeding up the nuclear energy program. In order to control expenses he stopped many state subsidies, but it forced many companies into financial trouble and even into re-trenchment. The Barre Plan, as it was called, seemed a necessary rem-edy, but it did not produce the economic recovery sought. The situation grew worse with an onslaught of social problems, increased juvenile de-linquency and a declining birthrate. Over the years, Giscard had become more and more distant, and he was accused by his critics, Mitterand in particular, of being too haughty and authoritarian. At this point a "bomb" exploded: the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné (the chained duck) revealed that Giscard d'Estaing had accepted a gffl of a diamond from the African emperor Bokassa. Overnight Giscard fell in disfavor. His term ended in 1981, but even with the Bokassa affair weigh-ing on him, he announced that he would seek a second term. He did and even won the first round of votes. But a coalition of Socialists and Communists won the second round by 52% against only 42% for Giscard. So the Socialist Francois Mitterand, a charming, eloquent Machiavellian man, easily won the presidency. France had suddenly turned to the Left. François Mitterand: First Socialist President of the Fifth Republic François Mitterand took office on May 21, 1981. His election was celebrated with unusual enthusiasm, by drinking champagne and by dancing on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. As he had promised his electors, Mitterand immediately dissolved the National Assembly in order to secure a new majority for the Left and thus be free to create his Socialist France. Among Mitterand's early clever gestures, he visited the tomb of the Un known Soldier under the Arch of Triumph and then he went to the Pantheon where he lay roses on several tombs carefully chosen by him for their political significance. On the tomb of Jean Jaurès, Mitterand honored the traditional values of Socialism; on the tomb of Victor Schoelcher, he honored antislavery, and on the tomb of Jean Moulin he honored the Resistance. Another clever move was Mitterand's appointment of four Communists as ministers (for transportation, health, professional training and civil service). The move was all the more clever since he already enjoyed an absolute majority in the Assembly. But this was a way to keep the Communists silent and no doubt under his thumb. Interestingly, during Mitterand's presidency, the Communist Party suffered a major decline, to the point of being marginalized. In 1986 the PC (Communist Party) was supported by only one in ten of all voters and by less than one out of five blue-collar workers. On the other hand, Socialists were gaining control of a good portion of the working class that used to be the traditional fief of Communists. Mitterand named a Socialist mayor from Lille to be his Premier, Pierre Mauroy. With all of this in place, the government proceeded to raise the minimum wage and social security benefits. It shortened the work week, adding an additional week of paid vacations (now five), taxed large fortunes, nationalized industries and private banks, abolished the death penalty and decentralized power from Paris to the regions. In foreign affairs Mitterand tried to find a solution to the Bosnian-Serbian crisis and the Rwanda civil war. He inaugurated the Eurotunnel under the Manche (Channel) with Queen Elizabeth of Britain on May 6, 1994. During the first year of Mitterand's presidency everything proceeded at a fast clip, but already in the second year the pace of reforms slowed down. Mitterand's ideals were changing. His government was slowly drifting toward the Center, away from the Left. These changes in economic policy and in political stand damaged Mitterand's popularity and this helped the extreme Right party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Le Front National. This party was gaining votes particularly in large urban centers with an important immigrant population. As a consequence, in the Leg-islative elections of 1986, the Socialist party suffered a painful setback, bad enough to put Mitterand's government to the test of "Cohabitation" (1986-1988) when there was a Socialist president (Mitterand) and a Right-wing prime minister (Jacques Chirac). President Mitterand was no longer able to govern and was reduced to presiding. That is to say that Mitterand no longer had real power, though he retained enough to thwart at times Chirac's Conservative government, for instance, by refusing to sign gov-ernment decrees. Mitterand, it is true, retained the prestige of the presi-dential office and, more importantly perhaps, preserved his desire to surface again with real power by winning the next presidential elections. Mitterand, in 1988, did win a second term with a 54% majority against Jacques Chirac, and obtained the election of an Assembly with a relative Socialist majority, allowing the return of a Socialist government headed by Michel Rocard as Prime Minister. Rocard did not last long, but at first won some victories: Putting down the rebellion in New Caledonia by promising a vote on self-determination in 1998 was a major success. Rocard failed in Mitterand's eyes by moving toward the Centrists. Mitterand replaced him with Edith Cresson, a move that proved to be a serious misjudgment because Cresson, who was called the "Iron Lady" (mimicking Britain's Margaret Thatcher), did not prove more able than Rocard. She was basically inexperienced in politics and she turned many people against her following several unfortunate comments. Cresson's position became all the more untenable when some of her statements echoed too closely Le Pen's Front National discourse. She finally had to resign on April 2, 1992. Pierre Beregovoy was appointed, but he remained only eleven months in power. First, he was no more apt than Rocard or Cresson, and second, he committed suicide in May 1993 following a dire failure in the April 1993 elections. Beregovoy was replaced by Edouard Balladur, a neo-gaullist, who soon was under attack for some of his decisions and for not relating well publicly. Balladur began to slip sharply in opinion polls and at the same time the French economy kept declining and unemployment kept rising. Mitterand was in trouble; he fought with his Culture Minister over Eurodisney; the president was in favor of letting Eurodisney in France for economic reasons, while Jacques Lang opposed it as a negation of culture. Nevertheless, Eurodisney opened in 1992 at Marne La Vallée, not far from Paris. Mitterand supported the European Union, but in spite of this, it was approved by the thinnest of margins. Mitterand changed prime ministers several times but without improvement. And so, in April 1993 the Right took 486 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly, thus obtaining the largest majority since 1958. Jacques Chirac, no longer standing in the wings, declared that Mitterand ought to resign. Mitterand, though, had no intention of doing that. He felt that, after all, Cohabitation was possible and that he could continue to handle the awkward situation. But in June 1994 the Socialists lost more ground and had to give up 6 seats out of 22 in the European Parliament. Meanwhile, something odd was happening with Mitterand's personality: He began to withdraw more and more, rarely leaving his residence, at least officially. Then France was made aware that the President had prostate cancer, a fact he tried to hide carefully to his very death. At the beginning of 1995 presidential campaign, candidate Balladur was challenged by Jacques Chirac who was ready for another bid for the presidency. Chirac started a non stop tour of France, trying to appeal to i the small and medium businessmen. He cleverly centered his campaign on areas where the Left had failed, i.e., on unemployment and poverty. He promised profound reforms in these two areas and a total break with v the past. In order to beat his Socialist opponent Lionel Jospin, Chirac promised wage increases, more support for education and came back again and again on the Socialists' failures in matters of crime, immigration, poverty and unemployment. Chirac's program was not really a reflected political platform; it was general, vague, but it touched on areas that concerned the French. It was a way to win votes and it worked. Chirac was elected and, once in power, Chirac appointed Alain Juppé as his Prime Minister, an able, competent, ENA-educated technocrat. The two men faced many challenges, the hardest one being to fulfill all the electoral promises. They had to redress the economic and international status of France, they had to respond to the international outcry caused by the continued French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and they had to try to correct the outcry against the government for not delivering the campaign promises. In addition, they were faced by the monetary constraint of the Maastrich Treaty in order to enter the European Union, and tha task was made even more difficult because the French were still divided on the issue and skeptical about the outcome. According to a poll published by Le Monde on September 4, 1992, the French were 56% against Maastrich and only 44% in favor. Jacques Chirac's Presidency under the Fifth Republic Chirac, having achieved his long sought ambition, assumed the presidential office on May 17, 1995, after a campaign on the need to reduce unemployment and making a clear break with the past. His announced program was attractive and imaginative: He would reduce working hours, increase taxes on speculative earnings, take drastic measures against polluting industries and reduce the presidential terms from 7 to 5 years. Promises are great if they can be kept; unfortunately Chirac had to change his focus almost immediately because France had to meet the criteria for entry in the Economic and Monetary Union requested by the Maastricht Treaty. So, instead of going ahead with the electoral promises, Chirac had to reduce the rather substantial budget deficit of France from 6% to 3% of the GDP by January 1999 and maintain the value of the franc. In order to carry out this revised program, Chirac appointed Alain Juppé as his Prime Minister, a well-educated product of the ENA, and at the same time Mayor of Bordeaux. Juppé was a competent civil servant, even if a bit distant and cold. Even with the help of Juppé, Chirac's reforms were slow to come, and he became unpopular as time passed without carrying out his electoral promises. In addition unemployment was still high and another huge problem had to be faced, the huge deficit of the French Sécurité Sociale (Social Security). Juppé announced some very strict reforms and he became terribly unpopular. The French were alienated by the Chirac-Juppé program and, meanwhile, Le Pen's party, Le Front National, was gaining momentum. Chirac was desperate, so much so that he took the improbable gamble of dissolving the National Assembly, thus calling for new elections and putting his party on the line. What was feared, but not expected‹certainly not by Chirac‹happened: the French electors veered to the Left, and voted Socialist. Chirac's move was immediately qualified a "strategic blunder" and people kept asking "why did he do it?", why did he dissolve an Assembly which was comfortably on his side, and why did he dissolve the Assembly at a time when both he and his Prime Minister, Juppé, were so unpopular for not having fulfilled their electoral promises? The most probable answer to those questions is that Chirac feared a catastrophe in the elections which were going to be held a year later. It is not improbable therefore that Chirac wanted to stop the slide and cut short to any worsening of his situation; he wanted to change course radically and move ahead. Some also suggested that he wanted to out distance Le Pen's Front National before it attracted to its side more dissatisfied members of the Right. Will we ever know the truth? After Chirac's Dissolution of the Assembly. - A New Cohabitation with a New Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin After the first ballot in the elections which brought back the Socialists, Juppé, who was by then the most unpopular Premier since the 1950's, decided not to run and the elections went, as stated, in favor of the leftist coalition. Lionel Jospin was elected with uncommon enthusiasm and the Socialists won 289 seats, the majority, in the 577-seat National Assembly. Along with the Communists and the Green (Ecologist party) the leftist coalition took 333 seats, while the Center-right coalition took only 243 seats and the National Front 1 seat. It forced Chirac to govern in a state of Cohabitation with an opposition party, that is to say, sharing power with a politically hostile government. At the start Cohabitation went well. Both men smiled at each other and both went a long way to appear in agreement. Chirac made efforts to appear in charge, relaxed and working hand in hand with Jospin. Soon the relations between the President and his Prime Minister became less cozy and they have not recovered; in fact one can say that they are deteriorating slowly, though as peacefully as possible. Lionel Jospin after his victory was considered the man of the hour and his plans of reforms were applauded. He felt that he had the support of the nation and so, as a hard conscientious worker, Jospin announced that he was going to revise controversial laws on immigration and nationality, and after a fight, he did. Jospin's honeymoon did not last too long; there was the rebellion of the unemployed, the opposition of Communists against Jospin's plan to sell the national airline Air France, and even more seri-ous problems, the two major ones being unemployment and the demands of the Maastrich Treaty. Some 500,000 workers were unemployed and living on benefits of $400 to $550 a month (considered the poverty line in France). Militant jobless workers demonstrated en masse in January 1998 unsatisfied by the stopgap measures of the government. Jospin's Communist allies began to drift away and Robert Hue, leader of the Communist party, even called for a referendum on the single European currency, the euro, claiming that the government should "reorient Europe toward social issues, employment, another way of using money." Jospin was caught between the hammer and the anvil; on the one hand he had to apply constraints imposed by the euro and on the other hand he had to satisfy the demands of the jobless workers. In order to placate protestors, Jospin promised an across the board increase in benefits for the jobless and needy persons in 1999. Jospin then also promised to cut the workweek to 35 hours by the year 2000 in order to create jobs, a proposal that passed after many debates. Teachers and students followed the unemployed in expressing their discontent. Jospin seemed to be constantly on the qui-vive (on the alert), but he managed to control the situation by giving in a little while remaining firm and determined. © Guy Mermier - France : Past and Present (pp. 80-103) ---------------------------------------------- FRENCH CINEMA: A BRIEF OVERVIEW 1895 28 December 1895 : Official birth of cinema as ³paying spectacle² associated with the Lumière brothers¹s cinématographe 1897 Georges Méliès builds the precursor of the film studio 1900-1914 France dominance of world cinema curtailed by outbreak of WW I (war in Europe leads to the Hollywood domination on world cinema) Early 1920s Louis Delluc¹s first ciné-club ³Impressionism² in French cinema ³Surrealism² in cinema : Germaine Dulac, Luis Buñel, Jean Vigo 1927 Napoléon seen by Abel Gance 1927 The JazzSinger made in Hollywood for Warner > the era of the Œtalkie¹ 1930 René Clair¹s Sous les toits de Paris (world-wide success) Early 1930s Crisis in French cinema exacerbated by the Depression and the financial collapse of film distributors Gaumont and Pathé mid 1930s ³Poetic realism² = stylisation of reality i.e. realism, simplified, exagerated, and rendered symbolic > Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert 1938 Carné¹s Quai des brumes ; 1939 : Le jour se lève) ; 1939: Jean Renoir Œs La Grande Illusion 1940-1944 German occupation > flowering of classical French cinema 1943 Creation of the national film school: IDHEC 1945 Marcel Carné & Jacques Prévert¹s Les enfants du paradis 1945 on Postwar ŒQuality Tradition¹ > literary adaptations of French classics 1950 Bresson¹s Le journal d¹un curé de campagne 1952 René Clément¹s Les jeux interdits; 1955 Clément¹s Gervaise 1951 Cahiers du cinéma launched in April 1951. Its editor, André Bazin, became the mentor of young critics, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer > Nouvelle Vague: Contempt for ³le cinéma de papa². Truffaut: ³I cannot see any possibility of peaceful coexistence between the Quality Tradition and an auteur cinema.² Renoir is stilll still considered as the classic auteur: writing, directing and even starring in his own films. The filmmaker is the equal of the literary writer, ex: Alain Resnais, Marguerite, Duras, Louis Malle... 1955 Alain Resnais¹s holocaust documentary: Nuit et brouillard, (as a warning not to forget the atrocities of the past) 1971 Marcel Ophüls¹s Le Chagrin et la pitié; 1985 Claude Lanzmann¹s Shoah [= annihilation] 1988 Claude Chabrol¹s Une Affaire de femmes 1992 Bertrand Tavernier¹s La Guerre sans nom (a 4-hour documentary on the Algerian war) 1956 Vadim¹s Et Dieu créa la femme (... ³mais le diable créa Brigitte Bardot²) June 1958 Launching of a ³New Nave² of French cinema with the preview of Chabrol¹s Le Beau Serge. ³ Filmer autre chose avec un autre esprit et d¹autres méthodes.² = Wanting to film something different with a different frame of mind and different methods.² 1959 Three films gave the ³new wave² a commercial as well an aesthetic impact: Chabrol¹s Les Cousins, Truffaut¹s Les 400 coups, Godard¹s A bout de souffle (Jean-Paul Belmondo) < debt to Hollywood thriller 1960s The French box office still is dominated by the popular genre of the thriller and the comedy Late 1960s increasing numbers of pornographic films > mid 1970s Godard¹s attacks on consumer society in Week-End May 1968 and political cinema 1967 Anti-war film, Loin du Vietnam by Chris Marker 1972 Tout va bien by J.-L. Godard, ³perhaps the best cinematic description of France in the aftermath of Œ68.² 1974 Pompidou¹s death, and with him death of Gaullism, which coincides with a wave of reinterpretation of the German Occupation and filmmakers who had been children during the Occupation > la mode rétro 1970s The Indochinese and Algerian Wars in fiction films: 1977: Shoendoerffer¹s Le Crabe-Tambour ; 1992: Dien Bien Phu 1992 Régis Wargnier¹s Indochine 1980¹s "Taking stoke of the inventory² > the ³heritage genre² Beginning of Beur¹s cinema. Ex.: 1985: Medhi Charef¹s Le Thé au harem d¹Archimède, Karim Dridi's Bye Bye, -------------------------------------------------------- ANOTHER BRIEF LOOK AT CONTEMPORARY FRENCH CINEMA (1958 - 2000) I. THE NEW WAVE (1958 -1968) More personal themes with a closer look at reality; Young directors: Truffaut (26), Chabrol (28); Godard (30), and with them a new generation of filmmakers (Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Eric Rohmer, Michel Deville, Claude Lelouch) Creation of an ³auteur cinema². The filmmaker is the equal of the literary writer, ex.: Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima mon amour) II. THE 1968 MAY EVENTS & THEIR CONSEQUENCES (1968 -1981) Apparition of a denunciation cinema (Costa-Gavras > Z, 1969) A new generation of directors, who link together the French cinema of the 1950s, the American cinema, as well as critical and pychological realism > Return to the ³Quality Tradition². Main representatives: Bertrand Tavernier, Maurice Pialat, Bertrand Blier, Claude Miller; Attention turned to problems in French society: Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Sautet, Francis Girod, Claude Chabrol, Coline Serreau; Another ³reading ³ of history: either in fiction cinema (Louis Malle), in docu-dramas (Agnès Varda, Bertrand Tavernier) or in documentaries (Max Ophüls); Many New Wave directors go their separate ways. Ex.: Rhomer (Ma nuit chez Maud, 1969), Truffaut (L¹histoire d¹Adèle H, 1975 or L¹argent de poche, 1976) III. AFTER 1980: YEARS OF DOUBT AND ECLECTICISM Heritage cinema: Return to literary inspiration, (Claude Chabrol, The Horse of Pride, 1980) to Pagnol in particular: Yves Robert¹s La Gloire de mon père & Le Château de ma mère, 1990), (Claude Berri, Jean de Florette and Manon des sources, 1986), Jean -Paul Rappeneau¹s Cyrano de Bergerac, 1990) Return to great literary adaptations: Chabrol¹s Madame Bovary, 1991, Berri¹s Germinal 1993, Patrice Chéreau¹s La Reine Margot, 1994, Yves Angelo¹s Le Colonel Chabert, 1994, Claude Lelouch¹s Les Misérables [du xxe siècle], 1995); Return to spectacular cinema: Luc Besson¹s Le Grand Bleu (1988), Jean-Jacques Annaud, Le nom de la rose, The Lover, 1992; Change of tone in film comedies: going from Zidi or Francis Veber¹s situation comedies, traditition of the Théâtre de Boulevard, i.e. light entertaiment for the popular classes - (Le dîner de cons, The Dinner Game), Le Placard, (The Closet, 2000) to more foolish comedies, e.g. Caro and Jeunet¹s Delicatessen (1990) or Jean-Marie Poiret¹s Les Visiteurs (1993); Triumph of a excessive cinema: excess in feelings, excess in form or of the fabulous ; Beineix¹ s 37.2º le matin = Betty Blue (1986), Besson¹s La femme Nikita (1990), Warnier¹s Indochine ; Massive arrival of women directors (relatively unknown in the U.S.). Exceptions: Agnès Varda, Cléo de 5 à 7, 1961, Sans toit ni loi = Vagabond, 1985), Diane Kurys, Claire Denis (Chocolat, 1990, J¹ai pas sommeil, 1994), Nénette et Boni, Brigitte Roüan (Outremer = Overseas, 1992), Josiane Balasko (Gazon maudit = French Twist, 1995) Continued vitality of well-established directors: Louis Malle (Au revoir les enfants, 1987, Milou en mai, 1989), Pialat (Sous le soleil de Satan, 1987, Van Gogh, 1991), Claude Chabrol (Une Affaire de femmes, 1988, La cérémonie), Bertrand Blier (Trop belle pour toi! = Too Beautiful For You, 1988), Bertrand Tavernier (La vie et rien d¹autre, 1989, L.627, 1992), Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse, 1991), Claude Sautet (Un coeur en hiver, 1992). Emergence of a new generation of filmmakers: Arnaud Desplechin (Comment je me suis disputé ma vie sexuelle), Cédric Kahn, Ch. Dupeyron, Xavier Beauvois, Mathieu Kassovitz (Café au lait, 1993, La Haine, 1995), Karim Dridi (Bye Bye), Tony Gatlif (Mondo, 1996), The (Belgian) Dardenne brothers (La Promesse = The Promise, 1996), Erick Zonka (La vie rêvée des anges = The Dream Life of Angels, 1998). -------------------------------------------------------- Films to be screened: 1. Mondo, 1996. A film by J. Tony Gatlif. Homeless in a paradisical world of sun and sea, no one knows where Mondo comes from. A gypsy boy of about 10, he appears one day on the streets of Nice with an irresistible smile and the question "Would you like to adopt me?" Hiding from the police while introducing himself to complete strangers, Mondo makes many friends: The magician, who takes hin on as his assistant, Thi-Chin, "a Jew born in Vietnam", who offers him shelter, Giordan, a fisherman who teaches him to read with letters drawn on beach stones and Dadi, a veteran of the streets, who is often a companion. Although hardships exist for him, Mondo revels in the sheer beauty of life on earth, a beauty he brings to those he meets as well ... until one day he disappears again. A note on the Gypsies The unchosen The old Ottoman Empire, before World War I, was officially said to include seventeen and a half nationalities. The half was the nation of the Gypsies‹to whom it has only in my own time become the courtesy to give a capital G‹and they remain a nation that is not a nation, a nation without frontiers, without a capital, without a homeland, without myths, without heroes, without monuments, without a Book. There are Gypsies and Gypsies, of course, and in some parts of Europe the oriental Romany strain has been so diluted that it is hard to know the difference between a Gypsy and a tinker, traveler or layabout. Over much of the continent, nevertheless, the name of "Gypsy" means much what it always meant, and incites persecutions and even pogroms to this day‹the inherited reaction, since classical times at least, of the settled to the nomadic. Especially in Eastern Europe the Gypsies have borne the brunt of prejudice. If they could not be exterminated, as the Nazis wanted, surely they could be turned into ordinary citizens like everyone else! The Polish Communists forced them into settlement, calling the process "The Great Halt." The Albanian Communists herded them into tenement blocks. The Bulgarian Communists forbade all mention of them, ignored them in census and made them change their names. Nothing seemed to work. By the l990s there were said to be some eight million Gypsies, the biggest and fastest-growing minority people in Europe. Various Gypsy institutions had come into being, in attempts to give some more conventional nationhood to the race‹in the elections for the Bucharest City Council in 1996 the Gypsies¹National Party got one percent of the vote, rather less than the Motorists¹National Party; but anyway no uniform of state, no lapel badge or armband, could be more unmistakable than the all but indefinable splash of bright color that was the mark of the Gypsy still. In every country the Gypsies were among the least-educated people: what a prodigious source of talent had gone neglected! In some parts of the continent they were universal scapegoats too, and almost everything, from petty thieving to state corruption, was blamed on them. In Romania especially, by then the center of gravity of European Gypsydom, every conversation seemed to get around to something the Gypsies had squatted in, spoiled, infested or were likely at any moment to steal. When I once surmised that perhaps their ill-treatment by the dictator Nicolae Ceauescu had something to do with their own behavior, pshaw! they said‹everyone knew Ceausescu was a Gypsy himself. © Jan Morris - Fifty Years of Europe On how France has been treating immigrants "Quietly, Europe's immigrants speak" PARIS - In the early morning, the construction bosses come to the smoky cafes near the Gare du Nord. One day they might need a half-dozen bricklayers near the station. The next day they might be looking for painters. The workers are gathered together and driven to the construction site, then dropped off at the end of the day. They are all foreigners, part of a broad invisible economy that exists somewhere between the illegal and the ignored. They and perhaps as many as 3 million more like them across Europe work in restaurants, on farms and at construction sites, doing jobs that pay little but that often require the kind of heavy lifting many Europeans now shun. As many European countries put up new barriers against what is increasingly perceived as an invasion of immigrants, little thought is being given to how Europe's envied standard of living has come to depend on the labor the illegal workers provide - or how it might fall if immigration were curtailed. ''There is a lot of hypocrisy,'' said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration. ''The jobs are there, and they basically act as a magnet. It's like a horse and carriage: You can't have one without the other.'' There is talk of keeping illegal workers out, but not of cracking down on people and companies who employ illegal workers. To do that, he said, would not be ''a vote-winner.'' The sans papiers, or ''without papers,'' as they are known in France, come from as close as Eastern Europe and Turkey, and from as far away as Central Asia and the former French colonies of West Africa. They have none of the workers' rights and protections or social benefits of the state. They are paid less than the legal wage, and are often paid late, and have no legal recourse. Although many have lived and worked in France for years, they have no right to vote, and face deportation if they complain openly about their condition. ''The immigrants do all the heavy work in France, but they don't get what they deserve,'' said Yashar, a man in his 20s who said he came here two years ago from Turkey's Black Sea coast, and who works in restaurants and at other odd jobs. ''It's a great injustice.'' ''They leave us here, but they don't give us papers - they exploit us,'' said Kahraman, 30, a Turk. ''The bosses who make us work don't pay taxes. ''Everyone thinks this is the home of human rights,'' he said. ''There are no rights. There's no right to work, no right to food. I can't send money to my family. Where are the human rights?'' Kamel Abichou, 37, a Tunisian, has fake papers. He works each day in catering. He is sure that his employers know he's here illegally, and that they use that knowledge to benefit. He is always paid late, he said, and two or three hours of work are regularly ''forgotten.'' He is always asked to stay later than others. Abichou, who belongs to no union, said he never complains for fear of losing his job. There are no real figures on how many illegal immigrants live and work without papers, but the numbers are probably in the hundreds of thousands in France, and in the millions across Europe. ''The difference between the United States and Europe is that the US has developed a lot of methodology to count the illegals,'' said Jean-Pierre Garson, a researcher on migration issues for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which groups 30 rich countries. Immigration experts often quote an educated guess of about 3 million migrants living and working in the 15 countries of the European Union. The only solid figure is how many people took advantage of an amnesty that five European countries offered in the 1990s; then, a total of 1.5 million illegal migrants came forward in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal. Umit Metin, director of the Assembly of Turkish Citizens in central Paris, said he believes France has 300,000 illegal immigrants. Allowing them to stay and work at underpaid jobs, he said, ''is another form of exploitation. It's another form of colonization.'' ''They are helping the economy of France,'' he said. Besides the Turks, who often work as artisans and bricklayers on construction sites, there has been a more recent flow of illegal Chinese workers employed in the clothing and textile industry. Many migrants work in seasonal activities, particularly in late July and August, when most French traditionally take vacations but builders want construction work to continue. A few European countries formally recognize that many immigrants are making a contribution to economic life. Germany enacted a migration law this year that provides for the legal entry of such workers as software engineers with highly sought-after skills. But most immigrants have lesser or no skills. Their presence has prompted a backlash in many countries, helping create strong gains at the ballot box for far-right, anti-immigrant political parties that accuse the newcomers of contributing to rising crime and unemployment. In the Netherlands, a new government has taken power after a huge popular outpouring for an anti-immigration political maverick, Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated the week before May elections. The new government that was formed after the vote is promising curbs on immigration. In Denmark, the government has instituted new curbs on migrants. In France, President Jacques Chirac used his Bastille Day speech on July 14 to promise to speed up the processing of asylum applications. That would be a significant change, because many foreigners who get into France from outside the European Union turn themselves in to authorities and say they were politically persecuted in their homelands. While they wait for their applications to be processed, they're allowed to live freely but must support themselves. Lacking papers, they take jobs in the underground economy. Processing those claims takes about 18 months and sometimes much longer; Chirac said he wants it done in a month. The logic is that this would mean fewer people working illegally. Under the current confusion, even if an asylum seeker is rejected, as happens 90 percent of the time, he or she has already put down roots and usually never leaves. Of the people turned down, about 70 percent simply vanish into French society. By Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, 8/18/2002 © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. Reviews In 1993, European director Tony Gatlif gave us Latcho Drom, the near wordless documentary about gypsy life, music and dance. With that seamless film, Gatlif proved himself a poet of cinema. Since then, many have been eagerly awaiting his return to the silver screen. 1997 brings the premiere of his newest film, Mondo. The film is based on a story by J.M.G. Le Clézio, the award-winning author of some 27 books. Le Clézio, considered by some to be a master of contemporary French literature, now makes his home in Albuquerque and teaches at the University of New Mexico. Mondo relates the parable of a 10-year-old homeless boy who wanders onto the streets of Nice, France, one day and proceeds to drift in and out of the lives of its shopkeepers, panhandlers and street performers. The film is luminously shot, imparting a dreamy, post-card glow to the avenues, markets and docks of seaside France. Mondo's greatest grace lies in its freedom from the constraints of plot. Throughout its 80-minute run, we are treated simply to a view of the world as seen through the eyes of this mysterious child. And what a world of small wonders it is: statues stare stone-eyed in an abandoned park, dew drops glow like diamonds on leaves, sunlight turns a kitchen table the color of gold. Innocence is one of the most honest filters through which we are able to perceive the world around us. Gatlif spins a warm, inviting web around us by showing not only what young Mondo sees, but how he sees it. As Mondo goes about his daily rounds, he sees the ugliness as well as the beauty that surrounds us: dogcatchers hunt down strays, police harass illegal immigrants. "Mondo" means nothing less than "the world," and perhaps that's exactly what Le Clézio's unadorned little fable is trying to show us. By centering on the exploits of a wide-eyed waif, Mondo could have wandered dangerously into the territory of the cute and mawkish. By casting its protagonist (11-year-old Rumanian gypsy Ovidiu Balan) as a mysterious Peter Pan without a past, Mondo exudes the surrealist air of a modern fairy tale. Thankfully, Mondo imparts its moral without proselytizing. Everything in Mondo is delivered "under the radar." Stepping out of the theater, though, you may find your senses a little sharpened by the whole experience. Your eyes may take in a little more of your environment. Your mind may dwell a little longer on certain vistas. Awareness is perhaps the first step in any sort of understanding. Can we truly understand provincial problems like homelessness or global problems like war without first being aware of them? It's hard for me to imagine someone being immune to the charms of this exquisite little gift of a film. Mondo is beautifully shot, meticulously realized and perfectly acted by its cast of nonprofessionals. In times to come, I am sure that Mondo will be regarded as a cinematic classic. - Devin D. O'Leary Another Review In 1929, Jean Vigo who was called "The Rimbaud of cinema" and died at age 29, made an experimental, classic short called "A Propos de Nice," in which he treated slices of life in that city, juxtaposing with irony the wealthy, mostly old, tourists and with affection, the locals. In a sense, "Mondo is the inheritor of that film. It is about the meanderings of its young protagonist, explorations that are put in the context of the city and several Niçois (Nice dwellers). All, like Mondo, are treated with immense sympathy and not a hint of mockery. And none of them reacts to the youngster in the standard way, i.e. "Gypsies are undesirables, thieving and smelly." All the performers are amateurs. Mondo is played by Ovidiu Balan, a Rumanian gypsy about whom I know nothing except that after the movie was made he and his family [mother and grandmother] were deported back to Rumania. He lives by what is commonly known as "his wits," but without all the tricks and illegalities this expression may imply. First he is seen at one of those great farmer markets where he scrounges for discards. He sleeps outdoors on the grass. (In a surreal sequences, he is near statues of famous men and there's a voice-off commentary. One of the busts is Balzac's). One of the first locals he meets is a man on a bench, reading Flaubert. Out of a blue sky the kid asks him "Will you adopt me?" It's a brief, heart-rending moment that will be repeated later to a passerby. (In both cases the boy runs off). Mondo is curious, friendly, lovable. His smile is infectious, irresistible. I would adopt that boy without thinking twice about it. He then encounters a kindly ex-sailor who is fishing, teaches the child, discusses exotic ports with him, and later teaches him the alphabet in the most ingenious way. In succession Mondo also meets aged Dadi (aka Dove Man, as he keeps two birds) who is played by a real homeless Scot; a magician played by famous tightrope walker Philippe Petit; an older woman, Thi Chin in her big house and garden (of Eden?) who cares for him when he has a fever and befriends him. Seeing her garb he asks "Are you Vietnamese?" "No, I am a Jew born in Vietnam and I came here years ago." The cast includes a Turkish Kurd woman, a political refugee, who sings beautifully and adds to the splendid variety of music here; a postman who is a real postman; and other "real people." As Mondo explores the world around him, looks and listens, asks questions, tries his first elevator, gets soaked in rain and still scrounges for food, the persons he comes in contact with are just about all kind, including a bakery lady who repeatedly offers him bread. There's something both subtle and obvious as Mondo is placed in an environment of enticing French foods, supermarkets, fresh fruit and vegetables--yet at times has to get his sustenance from nature. Jean-Marie Le Clézio, one of France's best writers, has found an ideal director in Mr. Gatlif. Their collaboration results in something entirely fresh, novel, yet in the great French tradition of films in which children are seen with undertsanding, love, realism but also imagination. As in the classic "Zero for Conduct" by the same Jean Vigo mentioned above. As in the films of François Truffaut and several filmmakers of all periods. Is it an accident that a welfare officer says that Mondo is "a wild child," the title of a Truffaut movie? Or that in Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" the child hero worships Balzac whose statue we see and who is also the author of "Colonel Chabert," a name that appears on a prospectus that the postman hands Mondo as "mail for you"? The appeal, the warmth of the boy Mondo and of the movie "Mondo" cannot be described. Tony Gatlif, the filmmaker of Rom (Gypsy) lineage who made, among other Rom-themed movies, "Latcho Drom," combines in with much talent and in credible ways, fact and imagination, emotion without sentimental schlock, selective realism -- extremely well photographed and edited -- without cheating. Mondo disappears as mysteriously as he had appeared. His absence, like Gypsy magic, causes odd perturbances. The last words of the film's are voice-off: "We looked for Mondo everywhere. Then we forgot a little."- - Edwin Jahiel Possible Questions: - As Mondo goes around his daily rounds, he sees the ugliness as well as the beauty that surrounds him. Which examples of both have you retained? - What symbolism do you see in Mondo being befriended by Thi-Chin, "a Jew born in Vietnam"? - What happened to the young boy who plays Mondo in the movie? What have you retain of the added note on the Gypsies? First Writing assignment: Your personal overall reaction after screening this first movie. ---------------------------------------------- 2. Western, 1997. A film by Manuel Poirier Winner of the 1997 Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, this subtle, comic road film follows a traveling shoe salesman and a Russian immigrant as they meet, fight and eventually become friends while traveling along the western coast of France. "Using every inch of his wide screen, Poirier creates a breathtaking series of wide-open spaces, images of a Europe without borders that has room for everyone. It's a vision as seductive as it is willfully naive..." (Dave Kehr, New York Daily News). Synopsis From under the most unlikely of circumstances, a bumbling drifter and a chick magnet from Spain pair for one of the most refreshing roadmovies to hit the screen in a long time. While down on his luck, a travelling shoe salesman from Spain (Catalonia, more precisely) - Paco - happens upon a beautiful maiden - Marinette - with a heart of gold. Although this chance encounter with the lovely Marinette promises a new beginning for Paco, the two young lovers agree to test the fate of their affair with a trial separation. His life again turned upside down, Paco befriends broken hearted drifter named Nino and is persuaded to spend his time away from Marinette on a road trip through Western France (namely Brittany's Finistère) . During a three-week journey that never breaks ten miles, the unlikely duo's quirky escapades and hilarious misadventures form the bond of a warm and touching friendship that will ultimately determine the fate of Paco's love for Marinette and Nino's life on the road. Western on the Web http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/culture/france/cinema/fictions/100films/fr/087.html En français Quand Paco le grand Catalan rencontre Nino le petit Russe dans un Grand Ouest réduit aux dimensions d'un canton du Finistère... L'un plaît à toutes les femmes, l'autre aimerait plaire à une femme. Ils marchent et rêvent à haute voie sur les routes secondaires, et flirtent avec l'utopie d'un phalanstère plein d'enfants. = Western or when Paco, the tall Catalan, meets Nino, the diminutive Russian, in a Far West reduced to a French "Land's end". One of them is liked by all women, the other one would love ONE woman to like him. They walk and dream aloud on the secondary roads, and contemplate the utopia of a commune filled with children. J'ai envie de revendiquer l'utopie comme un élément nécessaire à la réalité, tout comme le rêve qui ne se définit qu'en rapport à elle. = I want to claim utopia as a necessary element of reality, the same as dreams are only defined in relation to reality itself. - Manuel Poirier, L'Humanité, 27 août 1997 Si Western est un film d'homme sur deux hommes, c'est aussi un incroyable film aveu en faveur des femmes, dont le cinéaste peint, l'une après l'autre, toute une galerie, dans le moindre détail de leur façon d'envisager, pour chacune, leur rapport aux hommes = If Western is a man movie about two men, it's also an extraordinary testimony in favor of women, of whom the filmmaker portraits, one after the other, an entire gallery, on how each one of them conceives of her relationship toward men. - Olivier Séguret, Libération, 27 août 1997 Reviews by three veteran film critics. "Two for the Road in Utopian France" What a tenderhearted delight is Western, the best-kept secret in town. Don't be put off by that misleading title: Manuel Poirier's road movie is actually set in western France, where two funny and hapless outsiders wind up joining forces and embarking on a wonderfully droll journey. The story begins when a salesman from Spain is outsmarted by a wily little Russian hitchhiker. It's an introduction that hardly has the makings of a beautiful friendship. But that's exactly what develops in a funny, romantic film filled with cozy intimacies and lovely, wide-screen images of the French countryside. Looking for love, these two lonely travelers find it in the most sweetly unpredictable ways. Audiences are liable to fall in love, too.    - Janet Maslin - New York Times The title of Manuel Poirier's warm and glowing Western has nothing to do with the American frontier but refers instead to the ruggedly beautiful west coast of Brittany. What's more, the terrain it covers is not geographic but that of the human heart. Winner of the grand prize at Cannes last year, among other key awards, "Western" is a delightfully subtle and perceptive blend of romantic comedy and road movie. Paco (Sergi Lopez), a shoe salesman born in Catalonia, is driving toward the port town of Le Guilvenec when he stops to give a pretty hitchhiker a lift -- only to have her replace herself swiftly with a slight, wistful-looking man, Nino (Sacha Bourdo), who she explains has been trying to thumb a ride for more than two hours.      In short order, Paco has his life turned upside down. Nino gets Paco to make a stop -- and drives off with his car, which is loaded with shoes. Paco is sitting by the road in a daze when Marinette (Elisabeth Vitali) stops to fix a loose license plate, and he shamefacedly asks her for a ride into town. Paco loses his job but commences an affair with the lovely Marinette. But no sooner has an idyll begun for Paco than Marinette insists that they take a three-week breather from their relationship to discover how seriously they feel about each other. Meanwhile, Paco has spotted Nino, and after a couple of plot twists, the two end up friends. Nino, a Russian émigré, persuades Paco to hit the road with him during that three-week break.      So sure is Poirier's sense of humor and pathos that all this elaborate but swiftly unfolding plotting becomes an amusing comment on the workings of fate and human nature. The film shifts gears as it covers Paco and Nino's aimless rambling over the countryside. Nino, it turns out, has been drifting in this manner for two years, since a Frenchwoman - whom he met in Russia and came to France to marry - stood him up.      Although they instinctively seek contact with as many people as they can, what Paco and Nino are really looking for is love. The need for people, men in this instance, to find someone to love in order to anchor their lives, is what "Western" is all about.      That both men are foreigners inherently heightens their sense of isolation. Yet "Western" doesn't attack the French - or Bretons in particular -- for being insular. To the contrary, most everyone the two meet is friendly and helpful. The dark, stocky, boyish-looking Lopez and the diminutive Bourdo are immensely likable guys, and their adventures are matters of both humor and pain.      American audiences, so conditioned to a fast clip, may find the film's leisurely paced 123 minutes taxing. But so consistently fresh is Poirier's take that it's worth it to sit back and go with the flow. - Kevin Thomas - Los Angeles Times Western is a road movie about a friendship between two men, and their search for the love of the right woman. The roads they travel are in western France, in the district of Brittany, which looks rough and dour but, on the evidence of this film, has the kindest and most accommodating women in the world. The Meet Cute between the men occurs when Paco, a shoe salesman from Spain, gives a lift to Nino, a Russian who lived in Italy before moving to France. Nino tricks Paco and steals his car, and when the stranded Paco sees him on the street the next day, he chases him and beats him so badly Nino lands in the hospital. Paco visits him there, says he is sorry to have hit him so hard, and the men become friends. Since Paco has lost his job along with his car, they hit the road. Road movies are the oldest genre known to man, and the most flexible, since anything can happen on the road and there's always a fresh supply of characters. Paco, who has always been a ladies' man, in fact has already found a woman: Marinette (Elisabeth Vitali), who befriended him after his car was stolen and even let him sleep overnight on her sofa-bed. Soon they've kissed and think they may be in love, but Marinette wants a 30-day cooling-off period, so the two men hitch around Brittany, depending on the kindness of strangers. If Paco has always had luck with women, Nino has had none. He's a short, unprepossessing man with a defeatist attitude, and one day Paco stands next to him at the roadside, points to a nearby village, and says, ``I'm sure that in that town, there has to be a woman for you.'' ``Really?'' ``Yes, there is a minimum of one woman in every town in France for you.'' This belief leads them to conduct a phony door-to-door survey as a ruse for finding the right woman for Nino, and along the way they make a new friend, Baptiste (Basile Sieouka), an African from Senegal, in a wheelchair. He teaches them the bonjour game, in which they get points every time a stranger returns their greeting. ``Go back where you came from!'' one man snarls at Baptiste, who laughs uproariously; all three are strangers in a foreign land. The emotional center of the story comes when Paco meets a woman named Nathalie (Marie Matheron), who invites them home for dinner, likes the way Nino cooks chicken, and unexpectedly goes for Nino rather than Paco. This woman's lifestyle seems unlikely (she is a male daydream of an earth mother), but she provides the excuse for the film's ending -- which is intended as joyous, but seemed too pat and complacent to me. ``Western,'' directed and co-written by Manuel Poirier, won the grand jury prize, or second place, at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival; that's the same prize ``Life Is Beautiful'' won in 1998. I think that's because it was set in France, and so absorbed a certain offhand flair. The same material, filmed in America, might seem thin and contrived; the adventures are arbitrary, the cuteness of the men grows wearing, and when Nino has an accident with a chainsaw, we can see contrivance shading off into desperation. The movie is slow-going. Paco and Nino are the kinds of open-faced proletarian heroes found more often in fables than in life. Their luck as homeless men in finding a ready supply of trusting and hospitable women is uncanny, even unbelievable. The movie insists on their charm, instead of letting us find it for ourselves. And although the leading actresses are sunny and vital, they are fantasy women, not real ones (who would be smarter and warier). One of the women in the film collects children fathered by an assortment of men, who capture her fancy and then drift away, apparently with her blessings. The movie smiles on this practice, instead of wondering how she found so many men so indifferent to their own children. By the end of the film she has given birth to her own orphanage and could hire the family out as a package to the casting director for ``Oliver Twist.'' The jury at Cannes loved this, but I squirmed, and speculated that the subtitles and the European cachet gives the film immunity. In English, with American actors, this story would be unbearable. - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Time Second Written Assignment: - First, compare Janet Maslin and Kevin Thomas's film reviews with that of Roger Ebert and then write your own critique. - (Cf Séguret's assertion: Western, a movie about two men or a testimony in favor of women? What do you think? - What language did we hear spoken in some of the Finistère cafés, which was not French? ---------------------------------------------- 3. The Last Metro - Le dernier métro, 1980. A film by François Truffaut It is Paris, 1942, under the German occupation, and successful Jewish theatrical director Lucas Steiner is forced into hiding. He entrusts the running of his theater to his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve), who must contend with Daxiat, a vicious pro-Nazi theater critic. Suspence and romance unfold as Marion is drawn to her leading man (Gérard Depardieu) despite her love for Steiner. Paris, 1942. Marion Steiner a repris la direction du théâtre Montmartre, car son mari a dû fuir. Lucas Steiner, qui est juif, est en fait caché dans la cave du théâtre, d'où il peut suivre les répétitions sur la scène. Marion doit composer avec les acteurs, les critiques pro-nazi, le couvre feu, la milice et les fouilles... Some critics have faulted Truffaut's films for their lack of clear social and political criticism. Stolen Kisses (Baisés volés), for example, was shot in Paris in 1968, the year of the great student-political upheavals there, but the film takes hardly any notice of this except in an offhand remark that Christine makes about attending a demonstration. What some see as a fault, however, is actually Truffaut's strength: He is after deeper and more important issues than the political or social crisis of the moment; his are universal issues of human life, love, and spirit. Truffaut's most overtly political film is Le Dernier métro, 1980, featuring Depardieu as Bernard Granger, a theatrical actor, and Catherine Deneuve as Marion Steiner, the owner of a theater who is continuing the repertory company in the absence of her Jewish husband during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II. Actually, the husband is hiding in the basement. This film again brings up the issue of the love triangle, as Marion finds herself in love with both her husband and Bernard. ... ou, mieux, en français... Le film se passe pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (1939-1945). Voici, pour vous aider à mieux comprendre le contexte, quelques termes clés avec leurs explications. a. l'Occupation Entre 1940 et 1944 la France a été envahie, puis occupée par les troupe allemandes. On appelle cette période l'Occupation. b. la zone occupée, la zone libre et la ligne de démarcation La zone occupée, la zone libre et la ligne de démarcation: en 1940, la France a été divisée en 2 zones: le nord était occupé par les Allemands, le sud était libre. C'est là que s'est installé le gouvemement de Vichy avec le maréchal Pétain à sa tête. La ligne entre les deux zones s'appelait la ligne de démarcation. c. la milice créée en janvier 1943 par le gouvemement français, la milice collaborait avec les Allemands. d. la Gestapo La Gestapo était la police politique du IIIe Reich. Elle était terrifiante car elle avait des pouvoirs presque illimités dans toute l'Europe occupée, et s'en servait pour torturer, exécuter, et envoyer ses prisonniers dans les camps de concentration e. un collaborateur Pendant l'Occupation, certains Français coopéraient avec l'Allemagne nazie (ils travaillaient pour eux, les renseignaient, dénoncaient les Juifs). Ces Français étaient des collaborateurs. f. la Résistance La Résistance a commencé en 1940, par des appels du Général de Gaulle sur la BBC, et la formation de groupes et de réseaux clandestins. Les résistants s'occupaient du sabotage des installations allemandes, de la protection des Juifs, de la transmission d'informations aux Alliés, et luttaient contre le gouvemement français (qui collaborait avec l'Allemagne). Petit à petit, les noyaux de Résistance se sont fédér´s au niveau national et le mouvement a reçu l'appui et la participation de plus en plus de Français. En 1944 la Résistance était aux côtés des Alliés pour libérer la France. g. un passeur C'est une personne qui aide clandestinement ceux qui veulent traverser une frontière. h. le couvre-feu Interdiction pour les habitants de sortir de chez eux (généralement la nuit). i. le marché noir Le marché noir existe surtout en période de guerre, ou quand les gens sont rationnés. Pour se ravitailler, ils vendent et achètent alors clandestinement des merchandises à des prix très élevés. j. quand la ville de Paris a-t-elle été libérée? La ville de Paris a été libérée le 25 août 1944. Voici maintenant des questions suivies de leurs réponses destinées à mieux vous faire comprendre l¹action du film lui-même. 1. Qui sont les personages principaux? Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), Raymond (le régisseur), Arlette Guillaume (la décoratrice/costumière), Nadine (la jeune actrice) Daxiat (le critique antisémite) 2. Où, et dans quel contexte historique le film se passe-t-il? Le film se passe à Paris, en 1942. La moitié nord de la France est occupée par les Allemands. 3. Pourquoi les Parisiens vont-ils aux spectacles? Ils vont aux spectacles car ils ont froid chez eux. 4. Au début du film, pourquoi Marion ne veut-elle pas embaucher l'acteur juif Rosen? Le certificat d'aryennité de Rosen est faux car il est Juif. Comme Marion cache Lucas dans le théâtre, elle ne veut prendre aucun risque, et elle ne veut surtout pas attirer l'attention de la police. 5. Pourquoi Jean-Loup accepte-t-il de dîner avec Daxiat? Pourquoi Marion refuse-t-elle? Jean-Loup n'approuve pas les idées de Daxiat, mais il sait que celui-ci peut lui obtenir l'autorisation de jouer la pièce. Il veut donc être en bons termes avec lui. En revanche, Marion refuse le dîner car elle le déteste et ne veut pas se plier à ce genre de bassesse. 6. Comment Marion se procure-t-elle son jambon de 7kg? Pour qui est-il? C'est Raymond qui obtient le jambon au marché noir, pour un prix très élevé. Marion l'achète pour Lucas. 7. Pourquoi Lucas ne peut-il pas fuir? Lucas ne peut plus fuir le pays car le passeur qui devait l'aider a été arrêté. Ensuite, la zone libre a été envahie et Lucas est connu et a un fort accent. 8. Quelle installation Lucas fait-il dans la cave pour pouvoir diriger la pièce? Grâce à un trou dans le mur, relié à un conduit de chauffage, il peut entendre tout ce qui se passe sur la scène. 9. Comment sait-on que Bernard est un résistant? Que prépare-t-il quand il dit qu'il fait l'ingénieur? Bernard a des rendez-vous avec un ami résistant. Quand il dit qu'il fait l'ingénieur il est en train de préparer une bombe qu'il va cacher dans un pick-up. Plus tard, un amiral allemand sera tué par le pick-up piégé. 10. Quel type de musique accompagne les scènes liées à la Résistance? La musique devient lugubre, elle est prenante et elle fait peur. 11. Quelle nouvelle Daxiat croit-il apprendre à Marion? Qu'essaie-t-il de faire à votre avis? Daxiat est venu voir Marion pour lui dire que Lucas n'a pas quitté la France. Il a en main la carte d'identité de Lucas, qui été trouvée sur un passeur. Il veut provoquer Marion, pour voir comment elle réagit, et lui montrer l'influence qu'il a. 12. Pourquoi Marion veut-elle vendre ses bijoux? Le fait-elle? Marion a besoin d'argent, mais Merlin (l'administrateur du théâtre) la dissuade de se séparer de ses bijoux. 13. La soirée au cabaret est-elle réussie? Pourquoi? La soirée tourne court: Nadine ne peut pas rester car elle a un rendez-vous avec les producteurs d'un film, Bernard quitte précipitamment les lieux quand il remarque la quantité de casquettes allemandes au vestiaire, et Marion part avec un ami de Jean-Loup, en le laissant seul avec Arlette. 14. Comment est Lucas avant la première? et Marion? Lucas est d'un énervement extrême. Pendant qu'il s'agite, Marion mange calmement et essaie de le rassurer. En fait, elle a le trac elle aussi, et elle vomit avant la représentation. 15. Décrivez l'attitude de Daxiat pendant la première. Daxiat arrive en retard, avec une Allemande, alors que la pièce a déjà commencé. Il dérange donc les autres spectateurs, et rend Marion furieuse: "Quel salaud, ton Daxiat" lance-t-elle en aparté a Jean-Loup. A la fin, il applaudit avec conviction. 16. Que se passe-t-il entre Marion et Lucas après la pièce? Que fait la troupe? Marion passe voir Lucas quelques minutes. I1 a pris des notes qu'il veut lui lire, mais elle ne veut pas et ne peut pas rester avec lui. Elle doit rejoindre le reste de la troupe. Son mari n'apprécie pas qu'elle le quitte ainsi. 17. Pourquoi Bernard veut-il que Daxiat fasse des excuses à Marion? Marion apprécie-t-elle la scène provoquée par Bernard? Quelles en seront les conséquences sur leurs relations? Bernard déteste Daxiat, et lui en veut de la mauvaise critique qu'il a faite de la pièce dans son journal. I1 lui ordonne donc de présenter ses excuses à Marion, et le passe à tabac quand il refuse. Marion est outrée de son comportement, elle le traite d¹ ³irresponsible² et de ³brute², et lui demande de "ne plus jamais [lui] adresser la parole". A cause de cet incident, leurs relations seront très refroidies, à peine professionnelles. 18. Que sont le cercueil et la corde que le théâtre reçoit? Ils ont sans doute été envoyes par Daxiat (bien que cela ne soit pas clair). C'est une vengeance et une menace. 19. A quel nouveau rôle Lucas a-t-il pensé pour Marion? Lucas pense déjà à la pièce qu'il montera après ³La disparue.² I1 lui parle du personnage principal en disant que c'est une femme "douce, tendre, elle est même amoureuse, et pourtant, elle est cruelle". En fait, c'est la description exacte de ce qu'il pense de Marion. Elle le sait, et elle comprend le message. 20. Quelle proposition malhonnête Daxiat fait-il à Jean-Loup? Daxiat explique à Jean-Loup qu'au regard de la loi le théâtre n'appartient à personne, et qu'il peut donc tomber aux mains des Allemands. La seule façon d'éviter cela est de mettre à sa tête une personne qui plairait aux Allemands, comme lui par exemple. 21. Que fait alors Marion pour tenter de sauver le théâtre? Voit-elle l'homme qu'elle voulait? Que se passe-t-il avec l'autre Allemand? Marion se rend a la Propagandastaffel pour rencontrer le Docteur Dietrich, qui est au-dessus de Daxiat, et auprès duquel elle espère pouvoir plaider sa cause pour sauver le théâtre. Cependant, le Docteur Dietrich vient de se suicider. Marion se retrouve alors dans un bureau avec le Lieutenant Bergen, qui lui serre la main si longtemps et de façon si appuyée qu¹elle prend peur et ne peut fuir que lorsqu'un autre militaire entre dans la pièce. 22. A quoi Bernard assiste-t-il dans l'église? Bernard assiste à l'arrestation par la Gestapo de son ami résistant. 23. Pourquoi Bernard veut-il quitter le théâtre? Que croit Marion? Pourquoi le gifle-t-elle? Bernard annonce à Marion qu'il va quitter le théâtre pour entrer dans la Résistance. Marion pense qu'il s'en va car ils ne s'entendent plus, et le gifle car elle croit qu'il se moque d'elle. Elle n'avait aucune idée qu'il était résistant. 24. Que demande Marion à Bernard quand la milice est dans le théâtre? Elle lui demande de l'aider à cacher Lucas, ce qu'il accepte. 25. Que se passe-t-il entre Lucas et Bernard dans la cave? Lucas annonce à Bernard que Marion est amoureuse de lui, et lui demande ses sentiments de façon directe ("mais vous, est-ce que vous l'aimez?"). Bernard est embarrassé, détourne le regard et ne répond rien. 26. Nadine a-t-elle fini par réussir? Oui, elle a obtenu le rôle principal pour un film. 27. Décrivez la dernière scène du film. Au début de la scène, il semble tout à fait clair que Marion rend visite à Bernard, blessé, dans un hôpital. Elle est très amoureuse, elle veut refaire sa vie avec lui, et il semble que son mari est mort. En fait, un peu plus tard, on découvre qu'ils jouent dans une pièce. Pour la première fois, Lucas réapparait, et a droit à une ovation de la part du public, enthousiaste. I1 monte sur scène. Tous les trois saluent, Marion au centre et tenant la main des deux hommes. Reviews "For French movies, a return to eminence". Janet Maslin. The New York Times Oct 19, 1980 v130 s2 pD1 col 1 (26 col in) "Truffaut recalls the Nazis in Paris". Tom Buckley. The New York Times Oct 14, 1980 v130 p19(N) pC5(LC) col 5 (36 col in) "Le dernier métro" Variety Sept 17, 1980 v300 p18(2) "Incorporating images in film: Truffaut and emblems of death" Truffaut stated that he conceived Le Dernier Métro partly as a way to evoke the atmosphere and physical sensations of wartime Paris from a child's perspective, a perspective built upon his own memories. Its plot centers on the fortunes of a theater company, the Théâtre Montmartre, whose Jewish director, Lucas Steiner, is forced to go literally underground during the Nazi Occupation. He hides in the theater's basement where he awaits his wife, Marion, to bring him food and news about her efforts to smuggle him out of France. By using a heating duct that opens onto a closet or placard in the wings, he is able to function as a phantom director for the company's production of a play entitled La Disparue ("The Missing Woman") in which his wife and another man, Bernard, have the leading roles. This production is closely monitored by a pro-Nazi critic, Daxiat, who has good reasons to be suspicious: in addition to Lucas's clandestine existence in the cellar, the company uses a Jewish girl as an assistant costume designer while Bernard is a covert agent for the Resistance. The theater's labyrinthine building thus serves both as a repository of and metaphor for the characters' secret activities and identities. The film's sets, somber colors and chiaroscuro lighting powerfully convey a sinister atmosphere of claustration and perpetual night. The ubiquitous presence of posters, graphic slogans, and advertisements adds a disquieting dimension. These placards merge theatrical and propagandistic faces (actors, soldiers, and political figures), titles (mostly of films and plays), slogans (in both French and German), shapes (notably the swastikas), and colors. By opening onto an imaginary world of cultural commodification and mass identity, the posters and advertisements function as perspectival objects that organize the crossing over of visual and ideological boundaries. Their circulation of imagery and propaganda in wartime Paris exploits the strategic appeal of the visual that subtends theatrical and political spectacles. The ideology of such posters and official notices involves the power to create a virtual world where mass consensus is efficiently realized through the repression of sexual, class, and "racial" differences. Conversely, the viewer - like the characters - is confronted by the task of negotiating and demystifying the visual, rhetorical, and ideological apparatus of this virtual world. After an introductory series of stills, documentary footage and accompanying narrative voice-over that locate the film's setting in Occupation Paris, September 1942, the main plot begins with a sequence of shots of a dimly lit street where Bernard attempts to pick up a young woman, Arlette. He rushes up to her side, awkwardly excuses himself, and blurts out, "Je vous ai vue... Je voudrais...." [I saw you....I'd like...]" (14). She calmly asks him if he wants to know the time, informs him that it is 7:20, and then asks if he is lost. Undeterred, Bernard explains that he has observed her from a bistro across the street and wonders if she would join him for a drink. She firmly declines and the camera follows her determined efforts to disengage herself from his advances as she walks from left to right along a wall. At the point where he tells her that it has been four years since he has tried to pick up a stranger, they stand in profile before a worn movie poster which depicts a man of heroic proportions looming over and enclosing an old woman and a young girl drawn to smaller scale within the outline of his torso. In the background that surrounds the man's head and shoulders, a cluster of faces peer out. At first glance, the old woman in the poster appears to wear a dress made of a material with horizontal lines. Careful comparison with the rest of the building on which the poster is fastened, however, reveals that the horizontal lines are actually slats in the wall, perhaps exposed by gunfire or bomb damage. Arlette tells Bernard she has had enough of their conversation and moves on. He stops her one more time and pleads for her phone number, which she gives with an exasperated sigh. As he jots it down, he realizes that she has given him the number for the correct time ("l'horloge parlante"). She laughs at his protests as she walks away and the shot then cuts to a nearby street where a small boy is playing on the sidewalk. The poster under which Arlette repels Bernard's verbal campaign presents a kind of palimpsest in which its printed image and underlying facade merge into a transitional space. Although Bernard and Arlette soon become colleagues - he as leading role in La Disparue and she as the play's costume designer - he quickly discovers why his repeated efforts to seduce her are futile: she is a lesbian. Her unwillingness to respond to his sexual advances is a form of resistance against an ideological gesture of framing and inclusion within a symbolic, paternal order, a hierarchy that is graphically represented by the poster's heroic figure who envelops the vulnerable figures of the two women. Arranged within the confines of a patriarchy, this cluster displays a family unit (the husband, the young daughter, and the grandmother) from which the mother is conspicuously absent, or - to adopt the title of the play within the film - from which she has "disappeared." Against this backdrop, Bernard appears to be trying to enlist Arlette as a way to cancel this familial (what Freud might term heimlich) void. The exposed slats and plaster in the image's interior reveal the uncanny or unheimliche signs of war, a view of the "reality" underneath that exposes the poster and its commodification of sentiment as a facade. The mother's absence reads like a kind of lap-dissolve over an image of destruction that blends into its surface through an accidental, but historically produced, trompe l'oeil. The second look needed to fathom the poster's ruinous and allegorical depth counters Bernard's reflexes of visual desire manifested by his first line: "Je vous ai vue...Je voudrais..." In addition to the poster's ideological doubling of the characters' interaction, the scene stages the appropriation of Bernard's voice and role. Arlette displays her familiarity with the standard pick-up lines by taking over his script: "Vous voulez l'heure?...Alors, vous êtes perdu? [Do you want the time?...well then, are you lost?]." In effect, she "imitates" his desire in a way that revises it and renders it harmless and "innocent." Her offer of the correct time is replicated at the end of the sequence when she gives Bernard the telephone number for the horloge parlante. Since the topos of the mismatched couple and images of the passing of time (especially hourglasses, clocks, and so forth) are common motifs in the early modern tradition of the memento mori, an iconography of death acquires a nascent shape at the very opening of the film. [...] The film's multiple references to boundaries suggest that they play a crucial role in structuring its meaning. In the opening series of still shots and documentary footage the narrator states: "The separation between the occupied zone and the free zone constitutes a sort of border that traverses the country horizontally" (13). This sequence culminates with a black and white photograph of Lucas Steiner, who, the voice-over intones (incorrectly), "had to leave France suddenly. He had no choice." The shot zooms into Steiner's face as it slowly dissolves into blackness, giving the viewer the impression of penetrating its surface. In order to "enter" the narrative, the viewer confronts an anatomical space beneath the skin. The thresholding of a flat surface of representation anticipates the opening shots of Bernard and Arlette where it reappears as a mise en abîme (in a litteral sense) in the movie poster. Other allusions to borders and frontiers conjure up the imminent peril that threatens the characters' lives, reflecting the rhetoric of boundaries that is an integral component of the discourse of death in the Western tradition (Derrida 3-17, passim). When two actresses show Marion how they use make-up to draw a stocking line on their legs, Marion looks underneath their bared limbs and sees a newspaper headline: "German Troops Have Crossed the Demarcation Line." A ligne de démarcation cuts across theaters of war and the bodies of the women. It also designates the border of a secret: Marion's reaction to the headline, unnoticed by the other two, barely conceals her terror that Lucas will not be able to escape. [...] Within its apparently accessible story about wartime camaraderie among a theater troupe, a dialogue de sourds (dialogue between the deaf) is played out. Language becomes not so much an instrument of persuasion and communication as a means of deception, disguise, and inadvertent exposure. Identity and allegiances are formed through a constant process of reading one's place in a shifting and perilous environment. Surrounded by Nazi soldiers, Gestapo spies, and Vichy operatives like Daxiat, attention to visual detail is a vital concern. The film's Jewish characters adopt tactics of mimicry and camouflage in response to the semiotics of race: Lucas Steiner mocks anti-Semitic caricatures by wearing a grotesquely exaggerated nose, while the young girl who assists Arlette stylishly arranges a scarf to hide her yellow star. All are aware of the stakes involved in how they read (in both active and passive senses) within a regime of visual and linguistic codes. This disruption of the characters' rhetorical voice - that is, their use of language in a way that conveys intention and perlocutionary force - and of their interpretation of visual cues, crystallizes around figures that elide desire and death. Near the end of the film, Bernard abandons his role in La Disparue in order to devote himself full-time to the Resistance. His decision reflects his tempestuous relations both on-stage and off with Marion, who plays the title role, Helena, in La Disparue. Cast in the role of a tutor, Karl, who falls in love with Helena, Bernard's conduct outside the theater provokes intense and even violent repugnance on the part of Marion. She repudiates his brutish, physical assault on Daxiat and when Bernard informs Marion of his intentions to leave, she slaps him in the face. Yet this reaction is hard to explain; as Lucas observes to Bernard when they meet in his hiding place in the basement, his wife is in love with Bernard. The scenes that present Bernard's departure take place in his dressing room. He is packing his belongings and removing photographs and playbills from the walls when Marion enters the room to tender her farewell. After exchanging pleasantries tinged by an underlying bitterness, they confess their mutually intense feelings for each other and wind up making love on the floor. At the onset of this emotional and sexual crescendo, they are shot in profile facing each other in front of a large poster advertising a Grand Guignol production entitled Le squelette dans le placard (The Skeleton in the Closet) in which Bernard had played the lead role before joining the Théâtre Montmartre. The illustration on the playbill features a skeleton that extends its grinning skull, upper torso, arm and hand to the viewer's left out from the recesses of a half-open closet next to an open doorway. Inside the doorway are listed the play's title and principal actors: the skeleton's hand points directly at Bernard's name, first on the list. From underneath the closet, a pool of blood flows into the poster's foreground. This skeleton's figure becomes a visual focal point behind and between Bernard's and Marion's verbal and erotic manoeuvres, which begin when Marion stands in the dressing room doorway and says good-bye. Bernard responds by closing the door and they kiss briefly. They then move away from the door and clear up their misunderstandings. Bernard admits that he is puzzled by her indifference to him, especially since she had kissed him on the mouth on the opening night. To this, as she moves in front of the poster, Marion asks incredulously: "Moi, je vous ai embrassé sur la bouche? [I kissed you on the mouth?]" . Bernard replies emphatically: "Vous-m'avez-embrassé-sur-la-bouche! [You-kissed-me-on-the-mouth!]." With the skeleton positioned between them, just to the right of Marion, Bernard seizes her hand and presses it to his mouth to kiss while she bends her head slightly downward. She laughingly appropriates Bernard's standard pick-up line and thus recalls Arlette's preemptive gesture in the opening scene: "Il y a deux femmes en vous... [There are two women in you...]." In the background - but clearly in focus - the juxtaposed image of the skeleton simultaneously appears to hold out its hand for her to kiss. "Oui" Bernard replies, "il y a deux femmes en vous: une femme mariée et une non-mariée [Yes, there are two women in you: a married and an unmarried woman]." A few seconds later, they switch positions so that Bernard and the skeleton flank Marion. As the two lovers wrap their arms around each other, they shift slightly towards the skeleton so that its phalanges appears to reach out and give Marion's neck and shoulders a bony caress. They then lie down on the floor, and in the sequence's final shot, we see Bernard's hand caressing Marion's legs as she repeats, "Oui, oui, oui, oui..." As in the opening scene with Arlette, the poster engenders an uncanny doubling that disrupts the scene's ongoing narrative syntax. Whether accidental or posed, the alignment of camera, actors, and image publicitaire (advertisement) animates the figure of Death by introducing it into the dialogic and erotic space of the two lovers. The spectator's evaluation of the skeleton's significance - in other words, the emblematic meaning of death in the scene - engages a plethora of questions. Is Marion flirting with death? Or is it perhaps Bernard, who will certainly "court" death as a maquisard (Resistance fighter), or rather is it both of them, who are surrounded by death? Because Marion occupies passive and active positions (she is kissed and kisses), the configuration of the two couples (Bernard-Marion, Marion-skeleton) gives the assertion that "there are two women in you" a vertiginous disposition. An allegory of "deaths" proliferates: the death of the play within the film, the death of art when yoked to ideological purposes, or, as Bernard suggests to Marion, the death of marital fidelity. Because of the controversial way that historical setting is handled in Le Dernier Métro, and in particular its Vichy-sponsored anti-Semitism, Truffaut's representation of death raises urgent and difficult issues. Not only was the film reproached for its glossy portrayal and trivialization of this deeply traumatic period, but critics also noted that, for a film about wartime Paris, it contains very little violence. Even Daxiat, the collaborator and theater critic who plagues the lives of the theater company, escapes in the end to Spain where he dies at an old age. It is, however, the film's conclusion that is particularly problematic, insofar as it tends to present death as a part of a Real that remains deferred by the story's nostalgic rendering of Occupation Paris. In the final sequence of shots, which pick up on the encounter in the dressing room, Marion visits Bernard in a hospital ward, apparently in order to renew their affair. At the beginning of the scene, the viewer can see through a window next to Bernard's bed a building across the street with two men leaning out from upper-story windows. Halfway through the scene, Bernard accuses Marion of having to invent new lies in order to visit him. She replies, "Mentir? Mais pourquoi mentir? A qui mentir? Puisqu'il est mort... [Lie? But why should I lie? And to whom? Because he is dead...]" (82). The set immediately changes: the figures in the window have become part of a painted backdrop in a theater. The encounter between Bernard and Marion turns out to be the last scene of a new play, written and/or directed by Lucas himself, who climbs out of his loge to join Bernard and Marion on-stage for a standing ovation that closes the film. Death is only one more trick of theatrical illusion. In order to develop a more nuanced view of the film's relation to its historical subject and to the politics of cinematic representation, it is necessary to examine in greater detail the notion of a scandalous secret, a "skeleton in the closet," that haunts its familial and social situations. A network of relationships and narrative structures in the film is immediately evoked by this referent. Lucas's clandestine existence is the most potentially explosive secret in the story, one that requires extraordinary vigilance on the part of Marion. But each of the other characters who work at the Théâtre Montmartre also has her/his secret, often involving some degree of sexual transgression or ethical ambiguity. Marion sleeps with a sleazy admirer whom she avoids at the opening night reception thanks only to Bernard's rather brutish intercession. Germaine, Marion's aged dresser, sends gloves to her lover, "mon numéro deux," who is a prisoner of war. The stage-manager, Raymond, has to admit at one point that his "secret" love affair with another woman (who turns out to be a thief and black-marketeer) is just a false rumor that he tacitly abetted in order to prop his self-esteem and virility. Jean-Loup, the nominal director of La Disparue, is homosexual. Nadine, who has a bit part in the play, works both sides of the sexual and political fences: she flirts with Bernard, is caught kissing Arlette in a dressing room and eagerly accepts acting and dubbing work for German-sponsored productions. The proximity of the emblematic closet in the scene of sexual passion between Bernard and Marion brings the film's representation of homosexuality into a particular focus. Truffaut's portrayal of gay and lesbian sexuality in Le Dernier Métro and other films has been praised by Stuart Byron as an example of his tolerance and "supreme humanism". Yet while Truffaut's politics of acceptance and his historically accurate linking of homophobic beliefs with fascist ideology are indeed admirable, sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, remain vexed and troubling issues in Truffaut's work. The film's "squelette dans le placard" has an epistemological function analogous to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees in the broader situation of homosexuality in Western culture and history, leading her to define "the closet" as a simultaneously marginalized and central site that ensures the alignment of cognition, sexuality, and transgression . In the film, the circulation and concealment of secrets, including homosexuality, structure the characters' intersecting narratives and mediate various kinds of trauma. The subdued references to homosexuality work to haunt the phantasmatic recovery of a dominant heterosexual subjectivity embodied by Bernard and Marion. The opening shot of the dressing room illustrates one aspect of this unease. Bernard's gesture of kissing the hand constitutes a kind of displaced eroticism that is reinforced by his transparent offer to "read" Marion's hand. In effect, his actions unite an ambiguous oral contact and an interpretative act that doubles or pretends to see a double of Marion: "il y a deux femmes en vous...." Marion's reciprocal and simultaneous "kissing" of the skeleton's hand would seem to suggest that on an unconscious level there are two (or more) women (or men) in the skeleton, or the closet, or the poster itself. The incorporation of the poster generates a self-referential movement by foregrounding a scandalous, pictographic detail into the story's narrative flow. Created at a time when the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave Cinema) was considered a dying movement, the film won a Cesar for Best Film on the basis of a massive identification with Truffaut's sustained mourning for the auteurist élan of an earlier generation. Yet this nostalgia for a defining moment of origins and originality is itself undermined by the fact that, as Gilles Deleuze notes, Truffaut and his confrères rehearsed a paradigmatic break with classical cinema accomplished by Italian neo-realist filmmakers a decade earlier. In a broader sense, the incorporation of images in Le Dernier Métro reflects both the circuitous or emblematic route by which a network of memories can infiltrate cinematic representation as well as the ambivalent mourning and repression of memory induced by historical trauma. - Alan K. Smith Mosaic (Winnipeg) June 1999 v32 i2 p10 Some critics have faulted Truffaut's films for their lack of clear social and political criticism. Stolen Kisses (Baisés volés), for example, was shot in Paris in 1968, the year of the great student-political upheavals there, but the film takes hardly any notice of this except in an offhand remark that Christine makes about attending a demonstration. What some see as a fault, however, is actually Truffaut's strength: He is after deeper and more important issues than the political or social crisis of the moment; his are universal issues of human life, love, and spirit. Truffaut's most overtly political film is Le Dernier métro, 1980, featuring Depardieu as Bernard Granger, a theatrical actor, and Catherine Deneuve as Marion Steiner, the owner of a theater who is continuing the repertory company in the absence of her Jewish husband during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II. Actually, the husband is hiding in the basement. This film again brings up the issue of the love triangle, as Marion finds herself in love with both her husband and Bernard. Questions: 1. How do you explain the title? 2. Show how war is permanently present in Parisian daily life. Give some examples. 3. What do the Germans do when we see them in the film? 4. How does the film present the French during the war? 5. Which colors dominate in the film? Why? 6. Compare the first and the last scene. What's the purpose of the off-screen voice at the beginning? How does Truffaut introduce the main characters? What do we know about them? What impression do they give? What has changed at the end? -------------------------------------------------------- 4. Story of Women - Une affaire de femmes, 1988. A film of Claude Chabrol Story of Women is a semifactual version of the life of Marie-Louise Giraud, an actual abortionist, who was executed by the Vichy government. The film is a well-crafted account of a dark period in French history. Chabrol¹s economical control of cinematic narrative stands him in good stead, lending his depiction of the nightmare of the Occupation the kind of melodramatic tension that has characterized his tales of minor crimes among the provincial bourgeoisie, v.g Madame Bovary. ³What I was interested in, said Chabrol of Une affaire de femmes, was to make a truly pathetic movie about a woman, who is alone and is completely unaware of what¹s happening to her.² In Chabrol¹s view, Marie is beyond the realm of good or evil. ³Ni Pasionaria de la sainte cause des femmes, ni salope opportuniste du malheur des autres, Marie Latour est une femme bien de son temps et de sa classe. Une femme libre aussi, qui se refuse catégoriquement à son époux revenu vaincu de captivité pour se taper un jeune libertin, vaguement gigolo-collabo, lui aussi hors-la-loi à sa manière² writes Gérard Lefort in Libération. = "Marie Latour is neither a hard-core feminist nor a slut taking advantage of other people¹s misfortunes, she is a woman of her time and of her class. She is also a free woman, who wants nothing from a husband who has just returned, [ill] and defeated from a German prisoner camp, and takes as a lover a young ³collabo², he too an outlaw in his own way." Gender in the war film: Une Affaire de femmes With rare exceptions - such as Diane Kurys' Coup de foudre (1983), French representations of the Occupation and the Holocaust concentrate on male experience, as do war films in general. This masculine discourse, epitomised by Pétain's speeches in Claude Chabrol's compilation of Vichy newsreels, L'oeil de Vichy (1993), is challenged by Chabrol's fiction film on female experience, Une Affaire de femmes (1988). Co-written by Colo Tavernier O'Hagan, and based on a true story, the film follows the efforts of Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert) to bring up her two children in Cherbourg during the Occupation. As a favour to a friend, Marie carries out an abortion, and gradually begins to make money through this illegal activity. Her husband, Paul, a prisoner of war, is released and returns to Cherbourg. It is he who finally betrays Marie to the police; tried in Paris for crimes against the state, she is found guilty and guillotined in July 1943. Chabrol films this story in a bleakly realist style, using music sparingly and shooting in brown tones which evoke deprivation and poverty. Marie's activity as an abortionist is a double threat to the official policy of collaboration, first by depriving the Germans of potential French workers, and second by contradicting the Vichy dogma of family and motherhood, inscribed in the motto travail, famille, patrie and in the celebration of la Fête des mères. Chabrol portrays the process of abortion with the neutral, unspectacular realism which characterises the film, but ultimately turns to the structures of melodrama to realise Marie's personal tragedy. Hence she rises highest in her creative ambition - to be a singer - at the moment of her impending downfall and arrest. A plot-line typical of the 'woman's film' thus dramatises the female war experience. In Une Affaire de femmes the Occupation is an experience that women have come to terms with and one which in a sense, does not concern men, who are largely absent. Marie rents out a room to her prostitute friend Lulu as a deal 'between women'; she cryptically tells Paul that she does 'women's favours' for her friends and neighbours; her tarot reading makes no mention of men, but suggests she will have many women in her life; throughout the film she enjoys female companionship with her Jewish friend Rachel, with Lulu and with the prisoners who share her cell in Paris. This iterative stress on the common concerns and responses of women in wartime sidelines the 'masculine' arena of combat, as it sidelines Paul within the narrative. He eventually takes his revenge for this - and for Marie's affair with a young spy - by denouncing his wife to the (male) authorities. Marie's response to her sentence is emblematic of the film as a whole and subverts the claims of the conventional war movie: 'Qu'est-ce que tu veux qu'ils comprennent, les hommes?' [What do you expect men to know about it?]. Enduring and ameliorating the conditions of war is here a woman's business, condemned and punished by the patriarchal Vichy state. © Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema,pp. 33-34) En français Une affaire de femmes ³Le fait divers comme métaphore de la lutte des classes² En choisissant avec Une affaire de femmes de traiter du droit à l'avortement, à un moment ou divers mouvements intégristes en France, et d'une plus large audience aux U.S.A., en demandaient l'abrogation, Chabrol colle à l'actualité; mais en plaçant l'action dans la France de l'occupation il élargit singulièrement son propos et à partir du fait divers entend photographier l'état d'une société sans renoncer à nous dire un parcours singulier celui de Marie/Isabelle Huppert, celui de l'impossible bonheur individuel dans un monde déglingué . Ce monde, celui d'une France écrasée par la défaite où le maître mot est survivre, Chabrol l¹évoque en plans serrés, la récolte des orties des premières images ponctuée par le plan large de la mer comme une impossible liberté, l'intérieur du café et ses jours sans, ses jours avec (alcool), dont en contrepoint le plaisir de la danse vient casser la désespérance que les vieilles affiches rajeunies pour l¹occasion de la L.V.F. et du retour à la terre nous restituent aussitôt. Ainsi, nous est donné d'emblée un décor, celui des années noires de Jean Guehenno, et une nature, celle de Marie, non point optimiste malgré son irréductible part de rêve, celui d'être chanteuse, mais opiniâtre. Contre le froid, la pluie, les rues vides et le ventre creux, Marie se bat, son horizon, nourrir ses enfants, sa volonté, demeurer. Dans cet univers qu'elle comprend mal, la déportation de son amie Rachel la laisse plus que désespérée, décontenancée, elle s'organise pour maîtriser le quotidien, arrachant à l'avarice des paysans quelques pommes de terre, aidant sa voisine enceinte à avorter, sans penser ni à bien ni à mal, parce qu¹entre proches la loi est l'entraide. Un soulier sur la table, Paul le mari est revenu de captivité, souvenir de Van Gogh à l'image, et improbable fantaisie de scénario, un homme parti au S.T.O. un prisonnier revient, un instant Chabrol paraît emboîter le pas à la propagande du Maréchal, malice. Désormais, la mécanique, implacable est en place, avant d'y être broyée, Marie y trouvera un semblant de bonheur: le bonheur dans le crime ? Certes non, Marie qui découvre que l'avortement peut être de bon rapport et qui, s'étant liée à une prostituée, n¹hésite pas à pratiquer le proxénétisme hôtelier, n'a guère conscience de se placer en dehors du droit chemin, la loi est faite pour les grands criminels pas pour les débrouillards. Abandonnant Paul à ses cauchemars de stalag, le négligeant avec une cruauté aveugle, la voilà filant le parfait amour avec un petit collaborateur quand elle soutient du bout des lèvres la Resistance. Comme Violette Nozière [title of a previous film made by Chabrol], Marie se situe par delà le bien et le mal. Cela ne signifie pas que Chabrol n¹ait sur cette aventure d'autre point de vue que celui de l'entomologiste. La premiere scène d'avortement, acte de solidarité entre femmes est filmée avec une pudeur extraordinaire, faite de retenue et de réalisme cru, mais d'où est bannie toute vulgarité. L'acte est à l'image fragmenté, éclaté et d'une certaine façon magnifié. Plus tard alors que Marie est devenue une sorte d'entrepreneur en avortements, la même scène est filmée sans la moindre précaution. Dans une lumière crue une prostituée au visage bouffi, assise les jambes écartées sur la table de la cuisine exige d'une voie éraillée que l¹on lui fasse passer un petit fridolin tandis que Marie demande à sa bonne Fernande de finir l¹opération. On a l'impression d'être dans une de ces pages de couverture du Petit Journal ou des virtuoses du crayon réaliste et des couleurs criardes donnaient au lecteur chaque semaine son comptant d'émotions. Chabrol retrouve la verve populaire des illustrateurs de faits divers pour signifier le passage de Marie dans un univers de la délinquance où l'issue est désormais toute tracée. Le crime involontaire, la mort d'une patiente, Jasmine et le suicide de désespoir, sous un train, toujours dans la grande tradition des premières pages du Petit Journal de son mari, justifient ce changement de ton. Chabrol, il est vrai, avait déjà commené à dégager des rets du quotidien et du vraisemblable l¹histoire de Marie, lui faisant rencontrer son amant Lucien, devant une estrade, ornée en fond du drapeau rouge à croix gammée, ou présidaient à une aveugle tuerie d'oies, côte à côte un maire rubicond, l¹écharpe tricolore au flanc et un officier allemand à la mécanique raideur. Cette image naïve, raccourci d'Epinal de la collaboration, a choqué lors de la sortie du film les amateurs de reconstitutions historiques soigneuses. Son authenticié est certes plus que problématique mais son rapport à 1'univers de la représentation du fait divers, avec ce goût des couleurs franches, que d'ordinaire dans une Une affaire de femrnes Chabrol refuse au profit d'un camaïeu de verts et de marrons plus dans la couleur du temps, est comme le signe que désormais nous sommes bien au coeur de 1'histoire d'un crime. Ce sont ces couleurs vives, couleurs de la débauche, de 1'argent vite gagné, couleurs de 1'illusion tragi-comique, couleurs du rêve de Marie d'être un jour une voix face aux foules, qui aveuglent Paul. En ce temps de lettres anonymes, il y va de la sienne. Bien souvent le fait divers se révèle dans la brutale lumière de quelques mots découpés dans un journal. Toute l'époque est là dira l¹historien des années de Vichy, toute la mécanique du fait divers tient dans la lettre anonyme dira 1'abonné de Détective ou le passionné des prétoires. Tout Chabrol est là de jouer dans le resserrement du geste 1'élargissement à l'ensemble d'une période et d'une société. Après le fait divers banal, le fait divers d'Etat. La dernière partie d'Une Affaire de femmes avec son avocat aux belles phrases toutes faites et lâche en final, avec ses magistrats bornés, tout en fourrures, tout en raideurs, son accusation ridicule et sa conclusion tragique, fait à nouveau la part belle aux images de convention. On quitte Le Petit Journal, encore que pas tout à fait, couloirs de prisons et cornettes de bonnes soeurs, mais on est toujours dans l'imagerie du fait divers cette fois-ci versant anar. Marie, ses ruses, sa rapacité, sa cruauté, son indifférence aux autres, s'efface pour l'épure de la victime expiatoire, celle dont les Etats, surtout lorsque les grands mots ne font plus les remèdes, font le sacrifice pour assurer on ne sait quelle cohésion sociale déjà disparue. Si Chabrol brandit au-dessus de son film le corps de Marie, sacrifiée parce qu'elle tente de se hausser du col au-dessus du troupeau, ce n'est pas seulement pour dénoncer Vichy. Par delà le régime du vieux Maréchal fouettard, par delà la haine des demi-soldes qui font des heures supplémentaires au service de l¹occupant pour la femme du peuple, sans que l'on sache bien ce qui les hérisse le plus de la femme ou du peuple, le moraliste qui sommeille au fond de tout cinéaste, fouaille les plaies d'une société dure aux humbles. Et ceci aujourd'hui comme hier; la lâcheté d'un avocat devant ses responsabilités, le bégaiement d'un stagiaire devant celle dont au nom de tous on va trancher la vie en témoigne. Le crime s¹est perpété sous la toile de Prud'hon La Justice poursuivant le crime, en une sorte de raccourci de l'injustice d'Etat, depuis près de deux siècles de République dont, dans l¹oeuvre de Chabrol, le Tribunal d'Etat est plus un prolongement qu'une cour d'exception. Acmé du fait divers sanglant, le crime d'Etat les résume tous et en les transcendant, les justifie; à l'image Chabrol est dans Une affaire de femmes allié du particulier, l'humble "crime" de l'avorteuse en général le crime d'Etat, entouré de l'apparat que l'Ancien Régime a légué à la bourgeoisie triomphante, commis au nom de la société tout entière, au nom du Peuple Français. Comme déjà il le laissait entendre dans Landru, pour Chabrol, le criminel n'est que le révélateur de l¹endurcissement dans le crime de la société et de son représentant, l'Etat; jamais cela ne vient si bien au jour que pendant les périodes de guerre, mais, implicite, la conclusion n¹est-elle pas, qu'en d'autres moments ce non-dit de la societé se dissimule plus aisément? Marie n'est pas morte de son manque d'amour pour Paul, elle n'est pas morte d'avoir négligé de suivre le droit chemin, elle n'est pas même morte d'avoir trop rigoureusement mordu le trait qui délimite le bien et le mal, elle est morte d'avoir voulu changer de condition, de s¹être rêvée libre. Le fait divers comme métaphore de la lutte des classes ? Avec Une affaire de femmes assurément. - © Michel Cadé Cahiers de la cinémathèque, Nº 58, mai 1993, pp. 83-85 In [a simplified] English translation A Reading Aid to Michel Cadé¹s Film review: ³Le fait divers comme métaphore de la lutte des classes...² = The News item as a Metaphor for Class Struggle Impossibility for Marie Latour to find happiness in a collapsed world i.e. during the nightmare of the 1941-42 occupation of France by Germany. Description of life conditions: first images of Marie with her two children, against the background of the Atlantic Ocean: metaphor of impossible escape Her only life outlets? Go dancing in a bar. Her own dream? To be a singer someday. Harsh realities: - having to feed two young children; - seeing her own friend Rachel (a Jew) deported; - having to put up with the greediness of French peasants, etc. Without thinking of committing any harm or any crime, she helps a neighbor to abort, simply because helping each other is a law of nature. Law is made for criminals not for those who try to survive. Abortions are just a means to survive financially; the same goes for the renting of a room to a prostitute in her house. For health reasons, return of her husband from Germany where he was held in a camp. Feeling contempt and repugnance for him, she even takes a young lover, who happens to be a young ³collabo² (collaborateur) i.e. someone making illicit money by dealing with the Germans. The first abortion scene, which, in Marie¹s mind, is just an act of solidarity between women, constrasts in its reserve with the following ones, when she has become ³a pro², in particular when she is ³working² on a prostitute, pregnant from a German soldier and asks her maid, Fernande, to finish the job... From then on, Chabrol utilizes a cartoonist-like approach to signify the passage of Marie into a world of wrongdoings, the outcome of which is made quite clear. Her actions are followed by a series of desasters: death of Jasmine, causing the suicide of her own husband... We were already in a non-believable situation when Marie met Lucien, her lover, at the goose lottery (to be understood as symbol of her own fate) where we see, side by side, a fat French mayor and a stiff German officer. Their juxtaposition is to be seen as another symbol of French collaboration with the Germans. This was also at a time when, in France, anonymous letters of denunciation were all too common. Hence, this is the method that Paul, her husband, is going to adopt to become an informer. Same cartoonist approach for Marie¹s trial and her ³crime against the State² (whose motto was ³Travail, Famille, Patrie² ( = Work, Family, Homeland). We witness the hypocrisy of a society too harsh on poor people, exemplified by the cowardice of the lawyer. The Vichy governemnt, borrowing from a Hitlerian law, intent on maintaining a high birth rate to compensate for war casusalties, has decided to make an example of her death. Conclusion: Marie did not die because she refused follow the right path nor because she had erased the distinctions between right and wrong, she died because she wanted to change her woman condition and for her dreams of wanting to be free. One Film Review The film is the story of a real woman, Marie Latour, who lived in a small French seaside town during World War II, and who was the last woman executed in France on the guillotine. Her crime? Performing abortions. It's something she more or less happened into by helping out neighbors who got pregnant, some by German soldiers, during a time when the French men were in prisoner of war camps or had been sent to Germany to work. Her own husband returns from such a camp, but cannot keep a job and the money she earns from performing abortions allows her to feed her children and move to a better place to live. In a truly brilliant performance, Isabelle Huppert shows us clearly how greed and ambition, not compassion and sisterhood, begin to take over as her motivating forces. She branches out into renting first one spare room and then another to prostitute friends, to make more money; she hires an assistant; she takes a lover who has Gestapo connections and gets her special privileges; she begins singing lessons and dreams of a career after the war as a singer. While she is always a loving mother to her children, she is in a loveless marriage and refuses to have sex with her husband. It is he who, after finding her is bed with her lover, turns her in to the police for performing abortions. In life as in films under patriarchy to transgress the law of the Fathers is to require punishment. Perhaps at some other time she would have gotten off with a fine or a short prison sentence. But the Vichy government was preaching the "restoration of morality" and they needed to make an example of someone. So Marie Latour was moved from the provincial courts to Paris and was tried, convicted and guillotined. The portrayal of this woman and her story in the film through the flash-back narration of her now grown son, is strangely distant and removed. The film does not sentimentalize. All of the characters are multidimensional, neither heroes nor villains but just people with their needs and desires, joy and desperation, their hurt and their revenge. Hollywood would have turned this material into a "weepy." In Chabrol's hands one sits horrified as the story unfolds, but without the emotional identification with Marie Latour that would make us weep for her. Nor does the film moralize, instead it raises moral dilemma after moral dilemma which continue to haunt us long after we have left the theater. Because the film doesn't try to manipulate your moral position, I suspect that there is room for a wide variety of readings of this film, depending on your own sexual/political views. A pro-lifer might see it as showing that Marie Latour had gotten her just reward, for example. For feminists, it is a vivid reminder, at a time when many people seem anxious to criminalize abortion, that the mind set that sent Marie Latour to the guillotine is very much still with us and needs to be opposed with all our strength. - Linda Lopez McAlister Some questions: 1. Pierrot's wish (over the birthday cake) is to be an executioner, "un bourreau". Why? asked his mother. " 'cause they put something on their head and one doesn't know who they are when they execute people". What idea, do you think, Chabrol is trying to convey? 2. What is the obvious symbol of the goose hanging by the legs that the blind players try to decapitate? 3. In this film, Chabrol sides with the poor and wants to tell us several important things. Such as, for example? 4. What would you add (if anything) to this comment of Michel Cadé? ³Marie did not die because of her lack of love for Paul, nor for neglecting to follow the right path, or for having erased the distinctions between right and wrong, she died for wanting to change her woman condition, and for her dreams of wanting to be free. 5. Whose voice, narrating the execution of Marie Latour, do we hear at the very end of the film? Writing Assignement: Your overall personal reaction to Une Affaire de femmes ---------------------------------------------- 5. Chocolat, 1988. A film by Claire Denis Chocolat and women's experience of the colonies Whereas during the 1970s, films set in the French colonies tended to dwell on the military or the political, it was only in the 1980s that 'the personal experience or semi-autobiographical recollection of an ex-colonial' became a common theme. Many of these 'ex-colonial' films have been made by women, among them Claire Denis's Chocolat (1988) set in Cameroon, Marie-France Pisier's Le Bal du gouverneur (1990) set in Nouméa, and Brigitte Roüan's Outremer (1990) set in Algeria. [...] What seems to characterise women's representations of colonialism is a critical perspective, but on a personal or domestic rather than a historical or epic scale. Frédéric Strauss has rather schematically contrasted the 'soft' films by Denis, Pisier and Roüan with 'hard' military accounts of colonialism by male directors such as Pierre Schoendoerffer, Régis Wargnier and Jean-Claude Brisseau. Certainly the marginal position of women in the colonies symbolises their marginality in society as a whole. Claire Denis has said of colonial wives and daughters that they represented France, but lived an empty and futile existence while their husbands and fathers lived a romanticised adventure closer to the world of Tintin. Claire Denis spent her early childhood in Cameroon, and on her return as an adult found herself accused of being a mere tourist. The question of identity raised by that experience is dramatised in the frame narrative of Chocolat, which presents a white adult narrator (Mireille Perrier), rather predictably called France, whose Cameroon childhood forms, in one long flash, the main body of the film . As France drives (left to right) through the African landscape, the past is suddeny evoked in a tracking shot which reverses her direction, and leads us (right to left) into the past. France's point of view is that no longer that of a French tourist but of a young girl who is part of colonial West Africa. The narrative now centres on France's parents, and in particular on her mother's unfulfilled desire for the black houseboy, Protée. The thematics of female desire, insufferable heat, and stifling convention are reminiscent of Duras's India Song, but Chocolat is far more conventional in form, and the constraints of the female colonial experience are tempered with an evident nostalgia for the period, the setting, and for childhood. Nevertheless this impression is qualified in the epilogue, in which the adult France is told by a black American soldier that he has both an Afrocentric past and a future, while she, as an ex-colonial, has neither. Denis has stated that she was determined not to restrict herself to the story of her childhood, but intended in this conclusion to give a glimpse of Africa after colonisation. Her two subsequent films, the quasi-documentary S'en fout la mort (1990) and the violent thriller J'ai pas sommeil (1994), continue this interest in contemporary society. © Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema, pp. 94-95) Several Reviews Watching Claire Denis' "Chocolat," you feel as if your senses have been quickened, reawakened. The movie is like sex for the eyes -- it's ravishing in a way that goes straight into your blood. Denis builds up her movie with such small moments and performances, as well as with moods you want to savor -- the lazy haze of afternoon, the romantic allure of evening. And though she may end with a cynical conclusion about cultural divisions, she also leaves you with enough images and (purposely) unexplained mysteries to last you long after you've left the theater. - Washington Post "Chocolat" is a film of infinite delicacy. It is not one of those steamy melodramatic interracial romances where love conquers all. It is a movie about the rules and conventions of a racist society and how two intelligent adults, one black, one white, use their mutual sexual attraction as a battleground on which, very subtly, to taunt each other. The woman of course has the power; all of French colonial society stands behind her. But the man has the moral authority, as he demonstrates in the movie's most important scene, which is wordless, brief, and final. - Chicago Sun-Times In Chocolat, a young woman is traveling alone in the Cameroon. As she looks at the countryside, her memories take her back to the 1950s, the last years of French rule in this African country. Her name is France and as a young girl she's isolated from her beautiful and bored mother Aimée and her father, a district officer who travels a lot. France's closest companion is Protée, the family's house servant. They share riddles and spend time together despite the racial and cultural barriers that separate them. Protée's sexual yearning for France's mother, and hers for him, is a source of tension in the household. This and other tensions that have been gathering are brought to the surface when a group of travelers from a downed plane arrive at the compound. Among them is a coffee grower who symbolizes the worst racist tendencies of colonial intruders. Also present is Luc, an ex-seminarian who is crossing Africa on foot. He eats with the servants, sleeps outside, and uses their shower. Singling out Protée, he says, "You're even worse than the priests who raised you." In the end Aimee decides to assign Protée to duties elsewhere. The humiliation and the anger he feels are directed at France. Now, still unreconciled to her past, this young woman listens to an American black who tells her that Africa holds no answers and that she has no future here. In her début as a director, Claire Denis has fashioned a subtle and very captivating portrait of colonial Africa, based on her own childhood experiences there. "I just tried to describe the visible part of the iceberg. In Africa, nothing is ever said. But the weight of things is always there." - Frédéric and Mary Ann Brussat Not to be confused with the Academy Award-winning film of the same name that came out in 2000, Chocolat is a slow, beautiful film about colonial French Africa in the 1950s. The film is framed by a present-day woman, France, who is revisiting North Cameroon, where she was the young daughter of Marc and Aimée Dalens, district officer in the remote outpost of Mindif. Most of the film centres on the tense relationships engendered by the family¹s houseboy, Protée. Protée is beloved by the young France and respected by her father, Marc. But he is envied by their house guests, and runs afoul of the mother, when she makes a pass at him; his refusal to accept her advance forces him out of the house. Chocolat is about the racism inherent in the colonial situation, and the impossibility of equal relations between the colonizer and colonized even, or especially, between lovers. Various French visitors arrive and leave Mindif through the course of the film. All of them show that they have been corrupted by the colonial system in one way or another. There is the wealthy coffee plantation owner who keeps a black mistress in his room and brings her leftovers from the kitchen, and the wives of the French civil servants who openly discuss the attractiveness of Protée. Despite a simmering mutual attraction between Aimée and Protée, they manage to maintain their proper social positions until late in the film, when Aimée comes on to Protée. Protée¹s refusal of her advance reveals the nobility of his character, and the penalty for that nobility in a corrupt environment. The film is an indictment of colonialism on a very personal level. The acting is strong, the sets and setting are beautiful and the production values are very high. The trouble with Chocolat is that it is so slow and subtle in building the tension surrounding Aimée and Protée that the effect of that tension verges on boredom. The slow place of the film is no doubt evocative of the slow pace of life in a remote town such as Mindif. But in mirroring that pace, the film no longer compels the viewer to want to watch it. In its subtlety, too, it lacks the punch of a more comprehensive critique of colonialism. There are worse economic and social inequalities than the aborted love affair of a civil servant¹s wife and her houseboy. The framing device is likewise unnecessary. The present-day narrative that begins and ends the film is so brief that it carries no weight on its own; nor does it add anything to the extended flashback that makes up the rest of the film. In short, an otherwise beautiful and beautifully produced film is marred by a script so subtle and under-written that it verges on inconsequence. - Graham Barron Le cinéma de Claire Denis - De Moi aux autres A l'origine du cinéma de Claire Denis, il y a Chocolat (1988), qui tient les deux bouts de la chame de la représentation cinématographique, Moi et les autres. C'est d'une part un film intimiste, autobiographique, racontant l'histoire de deux êtres féminins, une jeune mère et sa petite fille, dans un poste isolé du Cameroun, à l'époque coloniale. Et c'est d'autre part, dans ce contexte historique, politique et social, une manière d'aborder un problème de société devenu central à notre époque, celui qu¹en termes sociologiques on appelle les relations inter-ethniques (le racisme en est un aspect). Dans Chocolat ces relations sont celles des Blancs coloniaux, vus sous plusieurs de leurs espèces avec les Noirs du pays, leurs serviteurs ou non. Le retour au passé personnel est indiqué par la forme du film, qui se présente comme un voyage vers l'origine: la fillette devenue une jeune femme veut revoir au Cameroun les lieux de son passé. Mais ce retour la met en contact avec une recherche des origines beaucoup plus vaste et qui la dépasse. Elle rencontre par exemple un Africain devenu Américain, qui n¹est guère plus avancé qu'elle dans la découverte et la compréhension de "son" pays. L'art de Claire Denis consiste ainsi à intégrer d'emblée l¹histoire individuelle dans une vision du devenir historique et social. Cette vision intègre également passé et présent: loin que le passé soit enfermé en lui-même et re-historicisé comme dans Rue Cases Nègres (Sugar Cane Alley), il renvoie inevitablement aux problèmes tout à fait actuels que Claire Denis posera dans ses films suivants. Société métissée. L'une des raisons qui rendent désormais difficile la pratique du film intimiste, très peu situé dans son environnement, vient de cette hétérogénéité du social qui définit inévitablement les personnages par leurs différences - et c'est justement à chercher pour le dire de nouvelles formes de représention que s'emploie le cinéma de Claire Denis. Dans un entretien accordé a la sortie de son film de 1997, Nénette et Boni, la réalisatrice a donné quelques explications montrant comment et pourquoi elle se sent "poreuse", comme elle le dit, à toutes le formes de diversité ethnique et culturelle: Quand je suis arrivé en Afrique, j'étais un bébé. Mon père était admnistrateur des colonies. On déménageait tous les deux ans. J'étais l'aînée de quatre enfants. On a vécu à Djibouti, au Burkina, à Ouagadougou. Je me suis inspirés de ça dans mon film "Chocolat". Je me souviens d'un poste en brousse au Nord Cameroun (On était les seuls Français. A trente kilomètres, il y avait un missionnaire norvégien protestant avec sa famille, et juste a côté de chez nous un éleveur camerounais avec des enfants de mon âge. C'est une chance de grandir en sachant qu'il y a d'autres pays, qu'on n'est pas le centre du monde. J'avais le sentiment d'être poreuse. Cela m'a donnéle goût de la géographie. Très tôt j'ai eu conscience d'un ailleurs: le père de ma mère, un peintre, était brésilien; le père de mon père était concessionnaire Citroen à Bangkok. Grâce a cette porosité et avec l'aide du grand acteur noir Isaach de Bankolé, Claire Denis regroupe dans son film de 1990, S'en fout la mort, trois personnages principaux dont l'un, Dah, est originaire du Bénin, tandis que l'autre, Jocelyn, est antillais, et le troisième, un restaurateur français joué par Jean-Claude Brialy qui, ayant vécu longtemps en Martinique, y a pris le goût des combats de coqs et en organise maintenant clandestinement en France près de Rungis. Le mélange ethnique est plus grand encore dans J'ai pas sommeil (1994), qui se situe dans le 18ème arrondissement de Paris. [...]. On trouve dans J'ai pas sommeil à la fois des "petits Blancs" comme les vieilles dames qui sont à ce moment-là victimes d'un tueur spécialisé (un fait-divers qui a servi de point de départ au film), des Noirs africains ou des Antillais comme les deux frères, Camille le tueur et Théo le raisonnable qui ne rêve que de rentrer au pays, et enfin des étrangers de toute sorte, comme la Lituanienne Daïga qui, sur la foi de promesses faites par un séducteur désinvolte, débarque la dans sa vieille voiture, sans même savoir parler français. Théo vit avec une Française jouée par Béatrice Dalle, dont il a un enfant, et l'on voit concrètement à travers leur exemple comment se pose le problème des couples mixtes; car elle aime cet homme mais ne peut envisager de partir aux Antilles avec lui. Autre couple, homosexuel celui-là, autre mixité: Camille le tueur de vieille dames a entraîné dans l'aventure son amant français, une sorte de loque éperdue d'amour et de désespérance. Ainsi va la société métissée. © Denise Brahimi, Cinéastes Françaises, pp. 99-101. Nénette et Boni (1997) Claire Denis (written by Jean-Paul Fargeau and Denis) A Film Review by Roger Ebert There's an offhand cockiness to the characters in Nénette et Boni that reminded me of Jules and Jim and the other early Truffaut films where characters acted tough but were really emotional pushovers. Boni, a dreamy 19-year-old kid in Marseilles, shoots his pellet gun at a neighbor's cat, but has untapped reserves of romanticism and tenderness. It's Nénette, his 15-year-old sister, who's been tempered by life. Claire Denis, the gifted French director, tells their story as if we already knew it. There are throw away details, casual asides, events that are implied rather than shown. This creates a paradoxical feeling: We don't know as much, for sure, as we would in a conventional film, but we somehow feel more familiar with characters because of her approach. Nénette and Boni are the survivors of an apparently ugly divorce. After the breakup, Nénette (Alice Houri) lived with her father, and Boni (Grégoire Colin) with his mother. Now Boni lives alone, and one day Nénette turns up, seven months pregnant. She doesn't want the baby, but it's too late for an abortion, and so she accepts approaching motherhood with a grim indifference. Boni, on the other hand, is thrilled; he cares tenderly for the young mother-to-be, and dotes on every detail of the pregnancy. They form, if you will, a couple. Not one based on incestuous feelings, but on mutual need and weakness: Boni provides what emotional hope Nénette lacks, and her pregnancy adds a focus and purpose to his own life. It is something real. And reality is what he's been lacking in a love life based largely on his inflamed fantasies about the plump wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) of the local baker (Vincent Gallo, playing an American in France). Nénette et Boni is one of those movies that is saturated with sensuality but not with explicit detail. One of the most extended sex scenes involves Boni kneading pizza dough; what he does to the dough he does, in his imagination, to the baker's wife, and that is going to be one happy pizza. Boni is sort of a moody kid, who keeps a pet rabbit and is apt to fall thunderstruck into long rêveries of speculation or desire. The approaching childbirth is a reality check for him; we sense it will be one of the positive, defining moments of his life. About Nénette we aren't so optimistic. There are vague, alarming possibilities about the father of her child--the film acts like a family member that knows more than it says--and it may be years before N´nette recovers her emotional health. Claire Denis, born in French Africa, is a director who seems drawn to stories about characters who want to build families out of unconventional elements. I have never forgotten the haunting emotional need in her first film, Chocolat (1988), about a mother and daughter living in an isolated African outpost, the father absent, and finding themselves drawn to an African foreman whose ability and stability offered reassurance. With Nénette et Boni she makes a more delicate film. She feels affection for the characters, especially Boni, and is very familiar with them. Maybe that's why she feels free to tell the story so indirectly. This isn't a chronicle of events in two lives, told one after another. It's more like an affectionate fond chat. ``And Boni? How is he?'' you imagine the audience asking her, just before the movie begins. And Denis replying, ``Oh, you know that Boni ... .'' - © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. Questions: 1. Claire Denis says of her first film: ³J¹espère simplement avoir ouvert une petite fenêtre.² = I simply hope I¹ve opened a little window." From that ³little window², what is the clearest message that you have perceived. 2. Claire Denis doesn't tell us why she named her film Chocolat, a slang-ish term - no longer popular, and probably unknown to many French people, which means "to have been had". Is this the impression that she wants us to retain? 3. Chocolat is also one of those films rich in symbolism. Which examples have you retained? 4. The film is also quite heavy on typical stereotypes. Which ones, for examples? Writing Assignement: Your overall personal reaction to Chocolat ---------------------------------------------- 6. Overseas - Outremer, 1990. A film by Brigitte Roüan Historical Background (cf Introduction) ... One major problem for France was the growing process of decolonization. France, of course, wanted to retain its colonial empire, but nationalism was growing within native populations, a fact the French government was a bit too slow to understand, and that the French settlers refused to face at first. So France was suddenly engaged in a terrible war in Vietnam (IndoChina). It was to be a long, costly war and in fact a real nightmare, which ended with the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1955 and the withdrawal of France. Mendès France who orchestrated the Geneva treaty with Vietnam, gave the Tunisians and Moroccans their independence in March 1956. Mendès France, was thereafter the subject of ceaseless anti-Semitic tirades accusing him of having abandoned France's empire. Mendès France did nothing for Algeria because France considered it a part of the metropolitan country. When Jacques Soustelle was appointed Gouvernor-General of Algeria, precisely to maintain Algeria as a part of France, he said: "We must not, at any price, in any way and under any pretext, lose Algeria." Immediately the Algerian nationalists who had formed the FLN (National Liberation Front) began a campaign of terrorism and uprisings that kept escalating. The French government began to pour men in Algeria in the hope of crushing the rebels, but it was in vain, and that sad period has left, to this very day, deep open wounds in France as well as in Algeria. As a matter of fact, the Algerian episode may be considered as one of the tragic events of twentieth-century history and its consequences still continue to haunt France and Algeria. In any case it brought down the Fourth Republic when the French government, afraid of a coup by settlers and paratroopers under the command of Général Salan, called back de Gaulle, who drafted a new constitution, thus burying the Fourth Republic and giving birth to the Fifth Republic. The new Constitution of 1958 gave vast powers to the President and to the Premier, while the Assembly's own powers were curtailed. This format corresponded exactly to de Gaulle's ambitions and, indeed, to many Frenchmen's desires. Both thought that a strong government was the only way to rebuild France and to finally bring the Algerian conflict to a close. In October 1958 de Gaulle offered the Algerian rebels a cease-fire, but the Algerians, then, refused to stop fighting. They imagined that they could stand firm on their claim of independence because, even after pour-ing large quantities of men in Algeria, France was not even close to a victory. De Gaulle saw no end to the conflict, and after several failed negotiations, he decided that France should grant Algeria its indepen-dence. It was done on April 11, 1961. Immediately, a group of supporters of French Algeria, the OAS or Organisation de l'Armée Secrète attempted a coup against de Gaulle. Negotiations went on anyway, and finally an agreement was signed in Evian, by which France recognized the independence of Algeria. By June 1964 practically all the French troops had left Algeria. This marked the beginning of the end of France's colonial empire. De Gaulle had understood that France could no longer resist the pressures of colonial nationalism. Following Algeria's example, one after another of France's colonies declared their independence. Review Film Pied-Noir On his first visit to a war-ravaged region of his failing empire, Charles de Gaulle stood on a balcony in Algiers, proclaiming ³I¹ve understood you² (Je vous ai compris), while French settlers (pieds-noirs) and Algerian natives massed below him wept with joy. Historians of the Algerian revolution (a war the increasingly desperate French colonists terms the events²) still wonder just what the general thought he understood. Overseas, French actress Brigitte Roüan¹s fist feature as a director, traces the lives of three sisters in a French-Algerians military family from 1946 to 1964, as power violently slipped from French control. Three times the film returns to moments whose ambiguity is progressively unveiled, acts that (like de Gaulle¹s words) appear differently the more we now. Gritte, the youngest sister, tells a French suitor that he can¹t possibly understand the events then unfolding because ³you are not from here.² The pieds-noirs were a special kind of natives whose 130-year tenure a landlords of Algeria has thoroughly convinced them that they came from that place. In rapid French, somewhere between forceful and lilting (like the small, tough grace of her person), Brigitte Roüan spoke to me of her milieu. ³My father was a naval officer, and I was born in a port. You must be born on African soil to be pied-noir, as my family was. Their attachment to Algeria was almost physical, and it increased during the war, until when it was time to leave they felt torn from their ³lover,² the land. Still, after decades in Algeria, they spoke only the least bit of Arabic, just enough to pay the workers and give servants orders.² Overseas opens with a montage of barbed wire against a blue sky, a naval officer crowned with a halo, and three women approaching a boat. ³The barbed wire was meant to suggest enclosure, the lack of liberty for Arabs and for women, barriers which both sides were afraid to cross. I wanted to show people hemmed in by inherited property and preconceived notions, occupying prearranged positions, without the slightest degree of free choice. The men of that time were not allowed to cry, they were placed on pedestals, forced to be virile and magnificent statues, The women were addicted to one man. Such an education creates neurotic women, of which I am one.² (She laughs.) ³Before, we had one husband and seven children, and now we have seven husbands and one child. But it¹s all the same, we are the housekeepers of our neuroses.² Roüan¹s career as a director began with an accident of the body. ³I was pregnant, and though it was impossible to get work as an actress, strange men in cafés and in the streets would approach me constantly. So I sat home an wrote a script about a pregnant, out-of-work actress who prostitutes herself for a day¹s minimum Actors Guild wages.² La Grosse (The Pregnant One, 1986) won the French César for best short. A similar concern on the effects of war on women¹s everyday lives and bodies gives Overseas its strength. Occupying women are particularly implicated in colonial conflicts, because the front is so domestic, it permeates everywhere, and revolt comes from within. The Algerian struggle is present in Overseas like noise coming from another room, or seen in the peripheral vision of characters who might have remained at one remove from events. Outremer, the French title, refers both to France¹s ³overseas² colonies, and to a condition ³outre-mère². Roüan dedicated to her mother, who died during her early childhood years in Algeria and upon whom the character of her eldest sister is based. Maternal and geographical losses and displacements coat the film with a sense of attachments broken, the fierce impossible longing to belong to one place. Roüan¹s narrative, which returns twice in time, also allows her to resurrect the dead. ³The three sisters are almost an elaboration of one character, their stories complete each other.² Though their men speak of Algeria as property, each sister identifies differently with the land and the struggle for its control. Thus the second sister (feistily played by Roüan) constantly works the land to compensate for her sedentary husband¹s lack of interest in their farm. Yet one night she burns her own harvest, a gesture of self-sabotage for which her Algerian workers are blamed. ³The youngest, while her family makes racist remarks at lunch, has no words to express her disgust. Men control the discourse, and if a woman speaks, it is in her husband¹s language. So she simply vomits, as an instinctual means of revolt. But family always catches up with you in the end. ³I was born, really, in May 1968, when for the first time, as a student in Paris, I heard the [Algerian] war spoken in terms other than those used in my family.² Roüan had hoped to return to Algeria to shoot. ³It was supposed to be a French-Algerian co-production. All the agreements were signed. But it was July 1988, and in October of that year Algerian students rioted, and were massacred, and the authorities who may have known beforehand, made our work impossible. So I went to Tunisia, which is why the landscape barely appears in the film. Everything was smaller there, like Switzerland compared to France. Algeria is gigantic, sublime.² © Leslie Camhi Some Questions: 1. Outremer is dedicated ³à ma mère² i.e. to Roüan¹s mother, interpreted in the film by Zon. Outre-mer literally means "beyond the sea². However the title carries as well the hidden meaning of ³outre-mère² i.e. beyond the mother. What idea does Roüan want to convey? 2. Overseas opens with a montage of barbed wire against a blue sky, which, in Roüan's mind, is supposed to mean two important things. What are they? 3. Zon says to her children learning their catechism: ³Arabs are our brothers -- but only in Jesus.² How do you interpret her remark? 4. Brigitte Roüan¹s states that her film is not at all politically ambiguous in her description of the ³events² [the term employed by the French to avoid using ³rebellion²] that shook Algeria from 1954 to 1962. Which one of the three sisters is, through her actions, the clear expression of Roüan¹s political views? Explain. 5. Less clear perhaps are Britte¹s (or Roüan herself?) views on marriage? What is your own interpretation of the last scene when the audience waits for Britte¹s never-uttered ³I do²? Writing Assignement: Your overall personal reaction to Overseas ---------------------------------------------- 7. May Fools - Milou en mai. A film by Louis Malle (1932-1995), 1989 A Preliminary Note on the events of May ¹68 They were two distinct groups with distinct motives and aspirations involved. On the one hand, there were the young people (students and others). Their social and economic importance had massively increased in France as it had in most other Western countries as a result of postwar demographic changes and of influence. The phenomenon of 'youth culture' had arisen in France, the United States and elsewhere, but changes in social relations had not occurred at the same time. On the other hand, there were the 'workers' who had not benefited as much as they felt they ought to have done from France's postwar economic success, particularly the expansion recorded in the ten years since De Gaulle had returned to power, either through an appropriate rise in their living standards or through new styles of management or labor relations. The analysis of the May Events in the cinema and elsewhere frequently turned on the relationship between these two groups and on the mise en scène of what have been called the new social actors Synopsis The portrait of an upper middle-class provincial family living in Southern France at the height of the lovely month of May 1968. While Parisians are rioting in the streets, the wealthy, patrician Vieuzacs gather at their ancestral home to bury the family matriarch. Mirroring the social revolution occurring in the French capital, the Vieuzac clan stir up trouble between the generations and, in the process, unconsciously destroy the last vestiges of their aristocratic way of life. While national news can be heard on the radio, including De Gaulle's message and word of his departure from Paris, some family members want immediately to discuss what will happen to the estate. While waiting for the striking grave diggers, the group leaves the corpse in the house and goes out for a picnic. The sad family situation begins to seem like a party or a provincial version of the free-love and marijuana-smoking fun going on in Paris. Milou en Mai is, of course, a satire as well as a pantheist ode to nature. Milou quotes Voltaire: "J'ai décidé d¹être heureux, parce que c'est bon pour la santé." (I've decided to be happy, because it's good for your health.) Of course, are exalted the liberties of 1968, namely the rejection of sexual taboos. There are moments that remind us of classic scenes from Renoir's The Rules of the Games (1939), one of the most beautiful scene is, as in Renoir¹s, an outdoor picnic. Yet, all this is caricatured: every character is a sort of archetype: Milou the sexagenarian in communion with nature; his niece, the lesbian Claire, who brought in her girlfriend; his sister, the doctor's wife, the reactionary little bourgeoise, ready to frolic in the hay with her former boyfriend while her husband-doctor is away; the pontificating journalist overcome by the events and whose wife of the moment is a de luxe hippy; there's also Pierre-Alain, Georges's son, the exalted student... Louis Malle is a keen observer of French society and the ³values² reflecting the hedonistic bent of what we call la France profonde (the "deep France", to copy the American simile), le fric (money), la bouffe (food), la "baise" (sex ? a word that must not to be confused with un baiser - a kiss). We¹ll note also Malle¹s environmental concerns and the importance that he gave to the scenery and the countryside. Malle is also a satirist with provocative tendencies, leading to caricatures and clichés. To be noted as well the influence of his co-scenarist, Jean-Claude Carrière, with his Buñelian heritage (fable and onirism) Review Louis Malle's "May Fools" has a quality of mellow contentment. You feel in its images a sense of sunny embrace, a feeling of comfort and leisure and warm sensuality. You absorb it, the way you do the dappled light in the paintings of Renoir, or a clear, vivid day with a blanket laid out in the grass and wine rising in your blood. You bask in it. The movie is Malle's homage to those pleasures we think of as particularly French, and in making it, he is working out of the most affectionate, the most humane part of his nature; it's his most easy-flowing, bountiful movie. The film's spirit is one of affectionate satire, and its style suggests a commingling of Chekhov and Mozart and both Renoirs -- the filmmaker, Jean, and his father, Pierre Auguste. The story it tells is projected against the events of May 1968 when, all over France, a wave of radicalism threatened to leave sweeping social changes in its wake. The film's setting, though, is far away from the strikes and the riots and the free-thinking students who led them. At the rather ramshackle old country estate where the movie takes place, these upheavals are threatening only in a distant, abstract way. Life for Milou (Michel Piccoli), the amiable older son who presides over the house with help of the family matriarch (Paulette Dubost) and their meager staff, is as it has been for most of his 60-odd years -- peaceful, unstructured and geared to the rhythms of nature. But with the mother's death and the gathering of the clan for her funeral, Milou's world teeters as precariously on the edge of revolution as the rest of the country. Everywhere, change is in the air. Though Malle and his co-writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, draw these comparisons for us, they don't force them. Most of the information about what's happening back in the city comes by way of broadcasts on a battered old radio that sits irreverently close to where the body of the old woman has been laid out, or from members of the family as they arrive. For years, most of the family has remained distant from the family home, paying little attention to the estate or Milou, its ne'er-do-well custodian. Each one, though, has his own designs on the place. Most of them are united in the feeling that for too long Milou has benefited from their generosity. His daughter, Camille (Miou-Miou), the pampered wife of a doctor and mother of three, begins immediately to go through her grandmother's jewelry, while his brother, Georges (Michel Duchaussoy), and their niece, Claire (Dominique Blanc), plot the sale of the house and the division of the profits. Milou, meanwhile, looks on with horror, powerless as his way of life is systematically dismantled. Yet in the face of all this, a kind of giddiness overwhelms him. When Georges's son, Pierre-Alain (Renaud Danner), shows up, full of radical ardor and tales of a new order where people make love openly in the streets, "just for the pleasure of it," Milou's worries melt away. And the others are swept up in euphoria as well. Suddenly, new alliances are being forged. The casual flirting that Milou has indulged in with Lily (Harriet Walter), Georges's younger, liberal-seeming English wife, takes on a new urgency. Claire's lover (Rozenn Le Tallec) takes up with Pierre-Alain, and Claire with the randy trucker who gave Pierre-Alain a lift. For a moment, they all lose their inhibitions. Picnicking under a tree, they drink wine and smoke pot and let their fantasies soar. And in that idyllic instant, something new seems to be dawning. These sun-licked afternoon scenes have a dreamy lyricism and beauty; they're masterful in a quiet, understated way. Malle and Carrière poke gentle fun at the fatuity of this bourgeois play-acting, but they don't begrudge the characters their kicks. There's a marvelous scene in which the group, flying high from their indulgences and all that talk of free love, treat themselves to a rambunctious conga (which just happens to snake around the mother's body). And another in which Claire, as the militant front line in the new sexual revolution, takes off her blouse (in front of everyone) and offers her body for experimentation. Malle has called "May Fools" a "divertimento," and throughout, his touch remains musical, delicate and precise. All the elements -- including Renato Berta's luxuriant images and Stephane Grappelli's kicky jazz score -- are kept in perfect balance. The acting too. At the center of it all is Piccoli's Milou, the rumpled hedonist, and this graceful, resonant actor gives him just the right touch of charming laziness and self-absorption. Piccoli is marvelously ingratiating in the role. Milou has never quite grown up, and there's a paunchy innocence in his simplicity that makes him seem compatible to the new shifts in the culture. He's a natural flower child. Ultimately, though, what he comes to represent is the resilience of tradition and the status quo. After the storm clouds of radicalism have passed, very little of real consequence has changed. And earlier in his career, this might have provoked rancor in Malle. But there's a generous acceptance in the director's point of view. With age (and perhaps the distance of living part time in America), he seems to have come to peaceful -- though clear-eyed -- terms with his Gallic roots. The last section of the movie falters; at just the point when we need some resolution for his ideas, some sense of closure, the picture dribbles away into vagueness. But the movie's spirit is infectious; its effects are the same as those of Grappelli's music -- it makes your limbs hang looser, your soul unclench. If this isn't a great movie, it's a radiant, pleasurable, nearly great one. - Hal Hinson Another Review The month in which Louis -Malle's "May Fools" ("Milou en Mai") takes place isn't just a any old May. It's May, 1968, when, for a few chaotic weeks, French society seemed on the verge of remaking itself ‹radically, comprehensively, and for good. Students were rioting: ripping up the ancient, narrow streets around the Sorbonne to create barricades of paving stones; occupying buildings that represented to them the official culture of which the French are so inordinately proud; filling the air with insistent demands for the reform of the national educational system, for the fall of a the conservative government of President Charles de Gaulle and Premier Georges Pompidou, or simply for anarchy. Seizing on the momentum of the students' protests, the unions and the parties of the left took the opportunity to bring the country's normal commercial life to a stand off. Most of France went on strike: banks closed, deliveries stopped, trains didn't run ; gas for cars was almost impossible to come by. This amazing convulsion signalled to its participants the beginning of a revolution, yet many ordinary Frenchmen perhaps the majority‹experienced it as a novel kind of entertainment: an unscheduled holiday, a few weeks of roughing it without the comforts (or the tedium) of bourgeois routine. They had the thrill, too, of feeling that great drama was unfolding around them, that the everyday reality of France was turning into the ultimate New Wave movie‹heady, intense, exciting even when it wasn't as quite coherent, like something by Godard. (In our terms, France in May, '68, was a bizarre hybrid of the stark confrontation of the 1968 Democratic Convention and the idyllic noble-savagery of Woodstock.) When the dust cleared, De Gaulle was still in power, and France, with its usual unshakable self-confidence, went on about its business. The characters in "May Fools" are far removed from the stirring street theatre of May, 68, but, like everyone else in France, they're affected by it nonetheless. All the action in this film takes place in and around a rather shabby estate somewhere in the countryside: a big, musty old house stuffed with antiques of dubious value and surrounded by land that was once a vineyard and is now just land. The lord of this spacious and useless property is Milou (Michel Piccoli), a genial man in his sixties. He has the look of someone for whom life has always been serenely uncomplicated. Under his extremely casual supervision, the family's fortunes have run downhill, but his relatives don't bother him much; they're scattered all over, escapees from the rural boredom that suits Milou so well, and they're glad to let him take care of his aged mother, the rambling house, and the unproductive land. Contentedly free from scrutiny, Milou lives the life of a lazy country sensualist: he keeps his bees, browns in the sun, and gropes the housekeeper. (When the roof needs fixing, he sells a Corot.) On the sunny May day when the story begins, his mother dies taking her last breath while she is slumped on a bench where children's dolls sit and Milou summons the rest of the family for the funeral and the reading of the will. As the relatives arrive, bringing cars, kids, lovers, and their own noisy personal agendas into the peaceful oasis of Milou's little world, the movie starts to take shape. There's a sense that things are about to change, both on the large scale of French society and on the infinitely smaller one of Milou's life; everything that has been allowed to bask, unchallenged, in happy inertia is going to be shaken up, forced to account for itself. Malle and his co-writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, don't push the parallels too far. They use the upheaval of May, '68, very deftly: it intrudes on their comedy like distant thunder on a sunny day, and the threatened downpour of Meaning never develops - we get a cooling shower of light ironies instead. The movie sometimes evokes Chekhov (especially "The Cherry Orchard" and "Uncle Vanya") and somtimes the Jean Renoir of "The Rules of the Game." (Milou's mother is played by Paulette Dubost, who, fifty-one years ago, was the flirtatious maid Lisette in Renoir's film.) But it doesn't - really strive to be great. Malle and Carrière keep the tone airy and relaxed. "May Fools" just bounces along to the ???? musical rythm of its remarkable score, composed and played by the eighty-two-year-old jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli; the movie, like the music, has a delicate, joyful swing to it. And the revolution that is apparently in progress all over France is part of the texture. Everyone who arrives at Milou's house has been closer to the events than he has, and has something to tell him about the historic turmoil beyond the boundaries of his estate. He listens, although he isn't terribly interested in the outside world: he doesn't even own a television‹only an ancient radio, which is invariably switched on by someone else. His daughter, Camille (Miou-Miou), turns up fuming about the demonstrating factory workers she had to drive through to get to the house. A savagely uptight bourgeoise, with a doctor husband and three chidren, she believes that what the protesters need is "a firm hand" to slap them down; speaking of her grand-mother's death, she proclaims, inanely, "The revolution did her in." His brother, Georges (Michel Duchaussoy), a journalist, is a news junkie, who keeps his ears glued to the radio and talks only about politics. (He's a Gaullist, so he's nervous.) The arrival of Milou's niece, Claire (Dominique Blanc)‹she's the daughter of his late sister‹is delayed by the gas shortage. Late in the movie, Georges's son, a student named Pierre-Alain (Renaud Danner), drops in, having hitched a ride from Paris; he gives the family a fervent, lyrical eyewitness account of the revolution in the streets of the capital. "You can't know what's going on," he says. "It's completely new." Camille and Georges argue with him; Claire's young lover, Marie-Laure (Rozenn Le Tallec), is transported by Pierre-Alain and his tales of heroism, and becomes an instant convert to revolution (and heterosexuality). Milou doesn't look very attentive until the conversation turns to the sexual revolution. Pierre-Alain announces, "At last, people are making love for the pleasure of it," and the old satyr is all ears. He has been flirting seriously with Georges's young second wife, a hippie-ish Londoner named Lily (Harriet Walter); this is just the sort of talk he likes to hear. The movie's central joke is that this aging, apolitical landed gentleman is in some sense an embodiment of the spirit of May, '68‹not an enemy of the revolution but an unlikely cornrade. (At one point, he belts out a full-throated rendition of the "Internationale.") He responds instinctively to the irresponsible, anarchic aspects of the students' revolt: he has lived his whole life with the sole purpose of remaining a child‹free to take his modest pleasures where he finds them, in the open air and the cool, familiar rooms of his boyhood home. When the other members of the family, led by his greedy daughter, express their eagerness to sell the property and divide up the contents of the house, Milou throws a tantrum. "I want to die here!" he shouts. "It's my right! No one can rob me of my childhood!" His innocence could be pathetic, but it never is. Piccoli, in one of the best performances of his long career, is so vigorous and radiantly good-humored that we can't feel sorry for him; and Malle, although he treats Milou with some irony, is always unmistakably on his hero's side. This sympathy is a large part of the picture's charm; sometimes, though, that charm feels a bit too easy. When "May Fools" is at its best, it seems to vindicate the childlike spirit of Milou and to give the youthful ardor of May, '68, a poetic glow. Malle aims for, and mostly achieves, a graceful, drifting style, a mood of blissful sun-dazed inconsequence. When his touch falters, as it does in a few sequences toward the end, the movie verges on triviality: its concerns seem too small, its humor seems too cozily "Gallic," its point of view seems too mild and noncommittal. Its refusal to come to much could be taken, perhaps, as an ironic reflection of the ultimate lack of consequence of the May '68, revolt‹France returned to the (slightly reformed) status quo with alarming speed and efficiency. But that's strictly an intellectual justification: the film doesn't have to blow away like dust just because the revolution did. As determinedly minor as "May Fools" is, it's enjoyable throughout. It's all moments, lovely flashes of intelligence and observation, and some are exhilarating: a closeup tracking shot of Milou riding his bike through the overgrown fields; a scene in which, for the entertainment of a grandchild, he catches crayfish by sticking his hands in a stream and letting the creatures clamp onto his fingertips; a beautiful scene in which Milou, on the night after his mother¹s death, cries quietly in his bed and a small owl appears on his windowsill; a leisurely picnic on the grass, under a spreading tree, with the characters sprawled in a wide circle, and Milou announcing, a little drunkenly, "I haven't felt so young in thirty years‹long live the revolution!" The gentle sort of liberation that Louis Malle proposes in "May Fools" seems, for an instant, to bridge the gap between 1938‹when Milou felt young, and Renoir made his Popular Front film about the real Revolution, "La Marseillaise," and Grappelli was hitting his stride - and 1968, and even the gap between 1968 and our not very hopeful present. In this picture we can almost hear Malle, as he strolls through his memories of that May, singing to himself "Allons, enfants," very softly, a tender anthem. - Terence Rafferty. © The New Yorker 66: 73-75 (July 16, 1990) Some Questions: 1. The English title, May Fools, in fact, seems to better characterize the film than the original French Milou en mai. In what sense? 2. May Fools is, of course, a satire as well as an ode to nature. What are some of the pantheistic notations that you have retained? 3. May foold is a film that reveals a great deal about we call in French la France profonde i.e. the quintessential of France itself, which can be summed up in three words? Three slang French words, FBB for short. Which three words in proper English? -------------------------------------------------------- 8. Too Beautiful for You - Trop belle pour toi, 1988. A film by Bertrand Blier Synopsis The story of a businessman, who is married to an unusually beautiful woman, but falls passionately in love with his very plain secretary. Despite his wife's efforts to save their marriage, he leaves her for his secretary, but then returns for her. Four years after his affair, he bumps into his secretary again, who is now re-married, and his wife decides to leave him. In his inimitably subversive style, Blier has taken the stereotypical adultery tale and flipped it around to make a wonderful comedy-cum-social satire. Rather than having the husband run off with the pretty young thing, he falls for the dumpy frump with personality. Gérard Depardieu stars as a man who has the perfect wife -- she's glamorous, gorgeous and sensitive. Now he's fallen in love with a woman who's coarse, unattractive, and sensual. Their strange and over powering love triangle shatters a thin veneer of domestic tranquility, exposing everyone to the elements of raw emotion. "It's a brutally honest, thoroughly French and sometimes surreal examination of perfection and passion." Bertrand Blier (1939 -) "An elegant, sometimes caustic satirist whose films center on sexual frustration, identity and the inherent tension between men and women." Blier occupies a specific place in French cinema: a non- conformist, iconoclastic filmmaker, who, for the last 20 years, has been questioning social conventions, hypocrisy, taboos and moral rules of life in society. Some of his better-known films: Les Valseuses / Going Places (1973) This controversial film launched the career of Gérard Depardieu. The film follows the uninhibited adventures of two roving bandits traveling along the countryside. These two amiable rouges take what they want when they want it in the search for a woman who can truly appreciate their masculinity. Préparez vox mouchoirs/ Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978) Unconventional comedy about two men who try everything to make and insatiable woman happy. However, their efforts fail when they lose her to a precocious 13-year old boy. Buffet Froid / Cold Cuts (1980) Structured as an absurdly hilarious nightmare, the film's logic is twisted and stark. An unemployed man's wife is missing and he finds himself looking at his own knife sticking out of the belly of a fellow subway passenger. Together with the police chief and a paranoid killer, he gets closer and closer to the fateful end. My Best Friend¹s Girl (1984) Ménage (1986) Fast-paced farce with Depardieu and Miou-Miou about a roguish, gay crook, who thoroughly disrupts the lives of an impoverished couple -- sexually and otherwise. Merci la vie (1991) 1, 2, 3 Soleil (1993) Mon homme (1995) Film Reviews Too Beautiful For You (Prix spécial du jury, Cannes 1989) € Gérard Depardieu stars as a man who has the perfect wife -- she¹s glamorous, gorgeous and sensitive. Now he¹s fallen in love with a woman who¹s coarse, unattractive, and sensual. Their strange and over powering love triangle shatters a thin veneer of domestic tranquility, exposing everyone to the elements of raw emotion.The film has been described as a brutally honest, thoroughly French and sometimes surreal examination of perfection and passion. € Theme or, better still, parable of the unlivable male condition doomed to life-long distress, even for a man married to the most beautiful wife and looking somewhere else for physical difference and sentimental novelty. Result: man ends up alone. . . € Basis of Blier¹s film: vaudeville tradition of the ³French triangle² (husband-wife-mistress). Note the reversal: Bernard (Depardieu) is married to the woman (Carole Bouquet) who should be his mistress and in love with the woman (Josiane Balasko) who should be his wife. € ³It is short on plot and plays fast and loose with the conventions of movie reality. A number of scenes are simply the fantasies of the characters . . . At times the actors address the camera directly, as if they were in the sort of novel in which the author goes into a character¹s mind whenever convenient.² (Vincent Canby, ³Love Out of Sync in ŒToo Beautiful for You¹ ² New York Times). Another Review Bertrand Blier¹s Too Beautiful for You has just hit the movie houses. With the camera probing and circling to the accompaniment of Schubert, shooting at every turn through layers of glass, this droll fable turns into a dance of romantic fantasies, with each character¹s feelings refracted and multiplied, shattered and reassembled. Gérard Depardieu, looking chubby in a baggy double-breasted suit, plays a prosperous BMW dealer who has the good fortune of being married to Carole Bouquet. Ideally beautiful, socially impeccable, faultless as a homemaker and mother, she is a gleaming, fine-tuned luxury car of a wife. So Depardieu falls in love at first sight with his temporary secretary, a rather dowdy, unmistakably middle-aged woman played by Josiane Balasko. All this happens within perhaps the first three minutes of the film. The rest is a matter of role-playing, hallucination and heartbreak, as wife and mistress, rich and poor switch places. Always, no matter what stage of the drama they¹re undergoing, the characters are pursued by Schubert¹s music, the aural embodiment of a beauty too great to bear. Since the film is hardly what you¹d call goal-oriented, I don¹t think I¹m giving anything away by revealing that Depardieu ends up in the parking lot of a cheap motel, alone, protesting his fate to God (or to the writer-director or who has put him through all this trouble). Addressing himself to the camera, he shouts ³Votre Schubert, il me fait chier!² [Approximative] translation: ³Your Schubert makes me puke!² At that point, I actually felt sorry for him -- though I wouldn¹t have wanted to miss a minute of his agony. - The Nation (April 2, 1990) ...Et en français ... Trop belle pour toi,[...] cette fable en demi-teinte, qui raconte le coup de foudre de Bernard de Bernard garagiste fortuné, époux de la belle Florence, pour Colette, secrétaire intérimaire et quelconque. Une banale histoire d'adultère, somme toute. Seulement, voilà! Chez Blier, tout va à l'envers. Il fait de l'anti-vaudeville: qui imaginerait un scénario dans lequel un homme trompe sa femme avec une autre qui n'a rien pour séduire ? Personne, sauf Blier. Son grand plaisir, c'est de prendre les gens à rebrousse-poil. La France de 1973 s'endort-elle dans l'après-68 ? Le voilà qui tourne Les Valseuses [Going Places] ou l'art de croquer la vie sans scrupules. La sociétéde 1986 se carre-t-elle dans son confort tranquille? Il réalise Tenue de soirée ou les ravages d'une passion folle et fausse. En fait, Bertrand Blier est un moraliste. Mais un moraliste par la négative. Depuis des années, ses films hurlent tous la même chose: assez d'hypocrisie! Cassons tout! Chamboulons tout! Ses scénarios sont des jeux de massacre, des carambolages. Mais des carambolages ordonnés où se côtoient la logique et l'absurde, le réalisme et l'abstraction. Trop belle pour toi est un film éclaté, parsemé de ralentis et de retours en arrière. Des scènes se répètent, se répondent. Parfois, les personnages s¹arrêtent, fixent la caméra et soliloquent sur leurs états d'âme. Parfois, c'est la caméra qui va les chercher, glisse lentement, tourne autour d'eux, semble les envelopper mais les frôle seulement, comme s'il était impossible de les atteindre. De saisir leur vérité. Rien n'est vrai, selon Blier, et surtout pas les sentiments. ³Ce n'est pas la vie qui est une saloperie, mais l'amour², avoue Bernard le garagiste. Les personnages se croisent donc dans de brefs instants de bonheur. Et leur sincérité est éphémère car ils ont peur d'être pris au jeu des sentiments. Peur de l'habitude, de la routine, du vide. Alors ils avancent comme des funambules déséquilibrés enrre leur besoin d'amour et leur refus de l¹émotion. Avant de retomber dans leur solitude, dans un vide plus grand encore: ces infirmes du sentiment disparaissent dans l'ombre. Blier joue sur les zones d'ombre. Il nous empêche de tout voir, de tout savoir. Il utilise un écran large mais ne cesse de le réduire, de l¹obscurcir, de masquer l¹espace tels ses personnages qui masquent leurs sentiments. Blier joue aussi avec la musique. Celle de Schubert, ses lieder, ses impromptus aux mélodies nostalgiques et ses quatuors aux accords poignants. Mais, dans le film, seuls les enfants‹ceux de Bernard et Florence‹ semblent être sensibles à ce romantisme d'écorcé vif. Les adultes, ne s¹abandonnent qu¹un instant avant d'être repris par la réalité. Et le spectateur qui sentait monter en lui l'émotion se retrouve brutalement assommé par une pirouette en forme de gifle: ³I1 fait chier, Schubert.² Alors, soudain, l'on se retrouve aussi tout bête, tout seul. Désemparé. Désespéré. Trop belle pour toi est à la fois doux et cruel: Blier navigue entre la tendresse et le cynisme. Et les comédiens, déchirés et déchirants, vont de la confidence feutrée au cri. Josiane Balasko est triste, émouvante comme une âme en peine; Carole Bouquet, sublimement belle, blessée, écorchée et Gérard Depardieu hésitant, perdu. Touchant dans sa quête d'un bonheur impossible. Gérard Pangon - © Télérama Some questions: 1. Two stereotyped ideas are reversed in Blier¹s Too Beautiful for you. Which ones? 2. Blier has described Too Beautiful for you as a film primarily concerned with women. What does he mean? 3. Please comment on what an American film critic (Vincent Canby) has termed the typical French ³literary quality² (i.e. as the characters of a novel of Too Beautiful for you. 4. Despite the vaudeville [= farcical] situation, what is, in reality, the tone of this comedy? 5. Please, comment on Blier's inclusion of the music of Schubert in this film. 6. If there is a message in Blier¹s film (as exemplified in the last sequence), what¹s the message? ---------------------------------------------- 9. French Twist - Gazon maudit, 1995. A film by Josiane Balask Synopsis Cheating husband Laurent has it all - a beautiful wife, a good job and two adorable children. Somehow that isn't enough - he just can't stop having affairs. Loli, his gorgeous wife, fed up with Laurent's unexpected evening appointments, meets and is seduced by Marijo, a butch cigar-smoking lesbian. When Loli hears of her husband's adulterous activities, she is outraged and Marijo moves in to become her live-in lover. With Laurent's male ego in tatters, the stage is set for a sexy hilarious menage a trois battle for Loli's sexual favours. Will Laurent go to where no man has gone before to win his wife back? Actress/Director Josiane Balasko's latest film 'French Twist' [was] the second most popular film of the 1995 French box office. Balasko, one of the most popular French film makers, has always been a comic actress and author. Through 'French Twist' she wanted to talk about lesbianism to a large audience without hurting lesbian sensitivities and also to erase the guilt from lesbianism. Balasko blames poor promotion by the agencies for the absence of an international market for French cinema. She strongly denies any feminist leanings and believes that her films address everybody. Reviews Twist and Farce Marijo is an unemployed musician and a lesbian. When her van breaks down, she stops at the house of the beautiful Loli, near Avignon. Loli alone at home with her two small children, gives her some coffee and they strike up a friendship. Laurent, Lolita¹s womanising husband (an estate agent) immediately distrusts Marijo and wants her to go. He leaves, however, to meet another woman. After dining with Loli, Marijo eventually leaves, though she returns in the middle of the night. The following day she invites Loli and Laurent to a restaurant, with Laurent's friend and business partner, Antoine. When Laurent notices Marijo fondling Loli's knee under the table he makes a violent scene. He orders Marijo to go away and bars Loli from his bed. He goes on a bicycle trip with Antoine, gets very drunk and crashes his bicycle. Meanwhile Marijo has come back and she and Loli make love. Antoine inadvertently tells Loli of Laurent's numerous affairs. She installs Marijo at home and works out a weekly arrangement whereby she sleeps with Marijo and Laurent three nights each and one night alone. The situation breaks down when two of Marijo's friends, including an ex-lover, drop by. Jealous, Loli leaves home temporarily and demands Marijo's departure. Marijo agrees, but unknown to Loli, on condition that Laurent makes her pregnant. Several months elapse. Loli meets Marijo's ex-lover on a train bound towards Paris, and learns that Marijo is pregnant and working in a gay night-club in Paris. Thinking she has been betrayed, she decides to go and make a scandal: Laurent joins her by plane. A scene takes place at the nightclub and Marijo is sacked, whereupon she goes into labour. Later, Marijo, Loli, and Laurent are seen living happily all together, with Loli and Laurent's two children and Marijo's baby. Laurent is called to see a client. Diego; while they discuss the deal it is clear that the two men are attracted to each other. Review The strength of Josiane Balasko's French Twist, and the reason for its huge success in France, is that it revives the tired, though ever popular, triangular structure of the French vaudeville farce‹man, wife and lover‹with topical issues and the dynamism of modern comic acting. The original title of French Twist, Gazon maudit (literally cursed lawn) is one of the metaphors for female genitalia discussed by the giggly Marijo and Loli after their first dinner. It sets the tone for the film's representation of lesbianism: both oblique and frankly stereotypical. 'Butch' and 'femme' are taken to their limits in the looks of the two actresses. "Mummy, there's a man at the door," says one of Loli's children when the stocky and short-haired Marijo first calls in trucker's jeans and cap, while the adorable Loli, frequently holding a child in her arms, is all lissome curves, cascading curls and girly frocks. The lesbian as a mannish (and childless) woman, literally an outsider, is thus immediately evoked. Moreover, French Twist is clearly not interested in the politics of lesbianism: issues are dealt with on a stnctly personal level Within this format however, Balasko explores the myth of the 'normal' family and pinpoints the double standards of the laddish husband. In a scene apparently cut in the film's American release print, Antoine is seen attempting to seduce a young woman who is (unknown to him) his estranged daughter. The daughter has set up the encounter to check that her mother's derogatory portrait of her father is accurate. The scene economically condenses patriarchy's 'own goal': male predatory sexuality leads to men's loss of patriarchal power. In this respect, French Twist uses the figure of the lesbian as a catalyst. She reveals the problems of the heterosexual family and ultimately resolves them through motherhood. More than "love conquers all" the idea is that "maternity conquers all². A conservative discourse in some ways, but one which relocates power structure of the family along the mother-child axis; the large audience for the film in France would seem to indicate the acceptability, and thus recognition, of this phenomenon. The reduction of man to mere instrument of procreation is made plain in the very funny yet rather uncomfortable scene in which Laurent and Marijo force themselves, to 'make love' in order for Marijo to become pregnant. And while Marijo is initially the outsider, she becomes the figure of identification. The film laughs with her, not at her. Balasko, as a director, is aware of her theatrical and filmic comic heritage The ménage à trois scenes are a witty reprise, with the 'twist' of lesbianism of Labiche, Feydeau, Guitry and a host of other classic comedies, with frantic bedroom interchanges, slammed doors, and comic domestic scenes. An as in the best of this tradition. Balasko¹s timing is almost consistently excellent. That this type of comedy depends on precise mechanism shows on the few occasions when the film sags, or, on the contrary, when it strays into slapstick, as in the scene where Laurent's bike crashes into a pig. This scene also demonstrates the difference between successful stereotype (Marijo) and unsuccessful caricature (the two English sisters, apparently always sexually available for the men¹s visits). But Balasko, as director and actress, is also a prime exponent of a more modern comic tradition, that of the café-théâtre. Born in the wake of May 1968, café-théâtre humour combines topical issues, derision and naturalistic performances. Balasko, known in Britain for her dramatic role in Bertrand Blier's Trop belle pour toi, is here a consummate comic actress precisely because she injects a stereotype with a subtle, intimate performance. Abril who, in the last few years, has begun to carve out a comic career in France alongside her Almodovar résumé, employs her Spanish sex bomb¹s image to excellent effect. As Laurent, Alain Chabat, a well-known television comic, is a triumph of bemused ordinariness. Beyond their contemporary resonance, French Twist's 'new family' and sexual mores also strongly evoke Balasko¹s café-théâtre origins. A congenial, utopian atmosphere bathes the film, from its credit sequence evocation of Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' to the ending and its hint of gay male couple joining the group, as in Coline Serreau's 1977 Pourquoi pas! As with Serreau¹s films, it is easy to criticise this gently comic, utopian perspective as undermining the serious issues raised by the film. Nevertheless, while Pourquoi pas! was an independent art film with a limited distribution, French Twist made a lesbian relationship acceptable to a mass family audience,which is no mean achievement. © Sight and Sound, April 1996, Ginette Vincendeau Another (feminist) review One of the promotional images for Josiane Balasho's film prominently features Victoria Abril's curvy backside. A wireback chair frames her with an approximate heart shape, leading your eye to her just-below-frame derrière. She glances right, in profile, and wields a cigar. She looks demure and seductive, winsome and assertive. The mixed message of Abril's pose is to the point of the film's schizo affects: it's charming and obnoxious, progressive and retro. This is French Farce, with a familiar emphasis on sexual appetites and domestic abuses, all played as broad comedy, and all resolved by film's end (by way of happy pregnancy), so no one feels bad. The twist is that the movie's generic sexplay includes lesbianism, which still passes for daring, or at least somewhat unconventional, subject matter. That said subject matter is used toward exactly the same end that more typical subject matter might be used might be understood as some version of social and political progress. Now jokes made at the expense of a "diesel dyke'' can be as inane as those jokes made at the expense of a "lunkhead husband.'' Abril plays a French housewife, Loli. She's feeling confused: she's beautiful, sexy, a good mother (two kids) but she's also unhappy, sensing but not quite sure that her husband is sleeping around. Laurent (Alain Chablat, who is effectively unctuous and annoying) is a real estate agent who has sex with all of his wealthy female clients. It's not exactly clear why the women desire the boorish, self-absorbed Laurent, but this is the film's narrative point of departure: Loli is lonely and Laurent is not. Enter Marijo (played by writer-director Balasko), whose elaborately painted minivan breaks down near Loli's suburban driveway. Conveniently and symbolically, Loli's sink has just sprung a leak, and Marijo, being a truckdriver and a "mannish lesbian'' (she smokes cigars, wears pants and her hair short) knows how to fix it. When Loli learns that Laurent is skipping dinner for an evening "meeting,'' she invites Marijo to stay. The women talk and smoke and laugh, and by the end of the evening they're both quite smitten with each other. Loli is a bit taken aback by her own desire, displacing it onto Laurent when he comes home. He's already tired of course, and resists her advances. It's not long before Laurent, who is evidently much more observant than his wife, picks up on the women's mutual attraction. The movie then spends much time observing the results of his anxiety: he can't get it up with his buxom dates, he gets drunk and complains loudly to his Fred-Mertz-meets-Tony-Randallish best friend (Ticky Holgado), and he repeatedly gets up in Marijo's face to have it out "man to man.'' (At one point when she's outside waiting to speak with Loli, he goes to his balcony naked, displaying his penis because "it will do her good.'' We're invited to laugh at his silly guyness.) The farce mechanisms kick in hard when the three of them (plus the prop-kids) decide to live together, with Marijo and Laurent in separate bedrooms, taking turns sleeping with Loli. She luxuriates in their fighting over her, but gets jealous when one of Marijo's ex-girlfriends arrives for a brief visit (Abril has a tough part here: Loli is pretty stubbornly shallow). What's ultimately tiresome is the glib use of formula: it appears that a simple change of gender suffices to make a banal plot look vaguely new but familiar enough to be reassuring. Première Magazine has recently (March 1996) spotlighted Balasko as someone who might "make French film accessible'' to an apparently recalcitrant U.S. audience (and what about Depardieu? Or Truffaut or Deneuve for that matter?). As France's nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, French Twist is getting media attention, which means it might even garner an audience beyond "arthouse.'' That it makes nice with these potential viewers isn't a bad thing. And there are some good reasons to see this film. Abril does physical comedy, including elaborate harrumphing and wide-eyed reaction shots, as well as anyone and Holgado has a great elasti-face. I found myself wishing, though, that the film would cut loose a little from its "accessible'' generic framework. © Linda Lopez McAlister .. Et en français ... Dernier tabou L'évolution des moeurs et la permissivité n¹empêchent pas qu'il reste ici ou là des sujets délicats à aborder. L'amour entre femmes, même et surtout après Coup de foudre [Entre nous in English translation] qui en traitait avec une pudeur extrême, reste un de ces sujets "tabou", peu représentés, qu'il est tentant de traiter par le rire pour les désamorcer. Ce qui est exactement le projet de Gazon maudit. Prenant le parti-pris inverse de celui de Diane Kurys, Josiane Balasko lance le sujet sans ménagement d'aucune sorte dans le grand public, le propulsant avec toute la force comique telle est capable d'y mettre elle-même en tant qu'actrice, dans un trio équilibré ou elle s'adjoint deux partenaires connus pour leur efficacité, Victoria Abril et Alain Chabat. Pour le meilleur et pour le pire, le sujet semble définitivement dédramatisé, assaini parce que tiré au grand jour hors des replis fétides du cinéma porno, démystifié parce que rentrant dans des clichés commodes à l'usage du sens commun. Le cinéma de Josiane Balasko se situe au niveau des apparences, c'est-à-dire dans un travail sur les apparences, transformations, travestissements, métamorphoses, etc. Travail qu'elle exerce d'abord sur son propre corps, comme on pouvait le voir dans un film antérieur, Ma vie est un enfer. Pour gagner en force, la réalisatrice y tirait le plus petit parti possible d'un sujet qui ne manque pas d¹intérêt: les souffrances et les fantasmes de la grosse fille laide qui voudrait être belle et séduisante. Une comparaison avec le cinéma de l'Américaine Barbara Streisand, et notamment avec Leçons de séduction, montre combien le sujet est riche en possibilités. Josiane Balasko n¹en tire qu'un seul effet, mais il faut reconnaître qu¹elle le soigne et qu¹il est d'une parfaite visibilité. La grosse fille laide qu¹elle incarne sous le nom de Léah, ayant fait un pacte avec le diable, se transforme en une incroyable vamp portant robe de Jean-Paul Gaultier ; lorsque le pacte se rompt accidentellement, l¹effet produit par la robe sur la vraie Léah-Balasko est d'un comique évident. Dans Gazon maudit (1994), l'actrice a composé le personnage de Marie-Jo avec un soin extrême, et c¹est une réussite. A cet égard le film est inventif, il invente un type qu¹il crée plus qu'il ne le copie dans la réalité. Dès que Marie-Jo descend pour la première fois de son camion (et il se trouve que c¹est devant la porte de Victoria Abril), on a tout compris de ce qu'est son personnage de "nana-mec" comme disait la chanteuse dans Simone Barbès ou la vertu. Là est évidemment l'efficacité du cinéma grand public, inégalable pour la fabrication des images et leur lancement à grande échelle. La dédramatisation de l'amour lesbien se fait par le comique de farce, ce que l'on ne saurait reprocher à la réalisatrice, qui ne fait que reprendre la gestuelle et les situations propres à ce genre comique, échange de coups de poing sur la figure, nez tuméfiés de part et d'autre, gens qui se promènent les fesses à l'air avec un tablier de cuisine par devant, etc. Cependant les faiblesses du film apparaissent dans ses dernières parties, lorsqu'une série d'épisodes totalement gratuits l¹éloignent de plus en plus de son sujet. Faute de trouver une solution à l¹existence du couple à trois et faute d'accepter une fin ouverte comme le faisait Coline Serreau dans Pourquoi pas!, Josiane Balasko sature le sujet de pitreries complémentaires qui ne le font pas avancer. Alors que, dans la première partie, on sent parfois à travers la drôlerie une vérite qui passe, la fin du film nous ramène aux clichés et semble s'y complaire. Le sens des derniers épisodes, s'ils en ont un, pourrait être que les femmes se retrouveront toujours autour des enfants à élever, tandis que les hommes rejoindront finalement leur fond d'homosexualité refoulée pour cause de virilité officielle. Grâce au brio des acteurs, on se dit que cette néo-pantalonnade ne manque pas d'un certain talent; il est plus difficile de savoir si de quelque manière le film représente une avancée hors des chemins battus pour ce qui concerne les comportements amoureux, conjugaux homo, hétéro, et les pratiques familiales ou sociales. Un tel résultat est à dire vrai peu probable, et le cinéma français reste à cet égard sur des positions conventionnelles. Sur ce même sujet qu'est l¹homosexualité féminine, le cinéma anglo-saxon fait preuve de plus d'audace et de plus d'originalité. Le film de la Canadienne Patricia Rozema, When night is falling ( 1995), en est un bon exemple. © Denise Brahimi, Cinéastes françaises,p. 106-107. Written Assignment: Compare and evaluate the three film reviews for this film (all written by three well-know women film critics) and write your own ---------------------------------------------- 10. Bye Bye. A film by Karim Dridi Synopsis Comment Ismaël va vaincre sa culpabilité, survenue à la suite d'un drame familial qui provoqua le départ de ses parents pour le bled, et sauver son frère Mouloud, douze ans, qui lui refuse de rentrer au pays et fréquente de dangereux dealers à Marseille. How Ismaël is going to overcome his feelings of guilt, the result of a family drama that occasioned the departure of his parents back to Tunisia, and save his 12-year old brother Mouloud, who refuses to accompany them and mixes with some of Marseille's dangerous drug dealers. "De Marseille à Los Angeles" : un interview avec Karim Dridi Several Reviews Just as African Americans are generating gritty films about their communities in the US (Boyz N the Hood), French Arabs are now issuing their own counterpart: hyper-realistic films about the industrial suburbs of France. These movies include Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (Hate) and now Karim Dridi's Bye Bye. Dridi, the child of an interracial marriage, wrote and directed this story of a Marseilles Arab family, which was at Cannes in 1995. Now independently distributed in the US, Bye Bye follows the lives of two young Tunisian brothers, Ismael and Mouloud, who come to Marseilles to stay with their extended family. Mouloud, a precocious preteen, falls in with small-time drug dealers who introduce him to the world of "cruising babes." Meanwhile, Ismael gets a job as a welder, and encounters racism as he tries to make friends. Ismael and Mouloud's sprawling Arab family is full of vivid characters: A grandma who hears all but is mute; a mother who sneaks cigs on the sly but chastises her son for being stoned; and Ismael himself, who is haunted by a childhood accident in which he maimed his brother. All of their lives are touched by an undercurrent of racial hostility, a timely reminder of the rise of ultraconservatism in France. But Dridi remains evenhanded, showing some humanity even in his most evil characters. Bye Bye's plot is muddled at times; it's difficult to reconstruct the past that the brothers are attempting to flee. But the film's throbbing intensity (and its pulsing world music beat), coupled with slow-moving footage of the Riviera's gray port offer a stimulating, if imperfect, view of the struggles of tenants in teeming French tenements. Another Review In France, where tensions are fierce between native French and a huge influx of Arab immigrants the port city of Marseilles, across the Mediterranean from North Africa, has the most troubled history of anti-Arab racism. There, Tunisian filmmaker Karim Dridi sets his second feature film, Bye Bye, a compelling look at Arabs struggling to raise their French-born children in a country that shuns them. Sympathetic but tough-minded, and directed with great assurance by Dridi, Bye Bye, tells the story of two brothers, 25-year-old Ismaël and 14- year-old Mouloud, who leave Paris to stay with their uncle and his family in a Marseilles ghetto. On the surface a plea for racial tolerance, Bye Bye also works as a family tragedy, a lament for fading cultures and a parable about the price of leaving one's homeland and relocating to a country that stigmatizes and isolates its newcomers. Dridi, who also wrote Bye Bye, traces those themes through the actions of the two brothers. For conscientious Ismael, still tortured by the memory of his brother's death in a fire, Marseilles holds the promise of a new beginning. But after scoring a job as a dockworker and befriending Jacky, a French co-worker, his dreams splatter against the wall of racism --embodied by Jacky's Arab-hating brother. For Mouloud, a rap-loving punk with free-floating adolescent angst, Marseilles is just another place to raise hell -- this time free from his father's gaze. Ignoring his older brother's warnings, Mouloud takes up with his drug-running cousin Rhida, starts living on the streets and brings chaos to his tradition-bound uncle and aunt. Does he want to return to his homeland in Tunisia to be with his mother? Hell, no. France is his place of birth and his home, much as that fact plagues his father. Dridi's direction is sharp -- he stages one remarkable scene in a drug dealer's apartment, shot in one long, uninterrupted take, and he draws strong, passionate performances from his North African cast. Bye Bye is a strong, craftsmanlike and heart-rending film that serves as a window into a neglected, little-understood culture - © San Francisco Chronicle Although Karim Dridi's second feature has all the elements of a slick gangsta flick -- crime, racism, disaffected black youths -- it shuns the clichés of overblown Hollywood violence for a more intimate but no less dramatic look at the relationship between two young brothers caught up in the cultural maelstrom of contemporary France. Two young beurs (the children of Arab immigrants to France) brothers arrive in the Mediterranean port of Marseille after a family crisis prompts them to leave Paris. Ismael (Sami Bouajilla) and his younger brother Mouloud (Ouassini Embarek) take up with their uncle and his lively family. Ismael finds work in a shipyard, makes friends with a white man. From the beginning, the two must fend against racist taunts and insinuations, but things get even more complicated when Ismael falls for his black girlfriend. Mouloud, meanwhile, has been ordered back to Tunisia, but instead runs away and gets entangled with a local drug dealer. In a slightly overwrought scene, Ismael bursts in on the drug dealer and rescues his younger brother. The two drive off into the sunset. Bye Bye's strength is in its characters: like the banjee boy grandson who hides his stash under his silent, tattooed grandmother, or the Negrophile's foaming white supremacist brother, or the based-out drug dealer and his pre-pubescent girlfriend. Dridi has created a narrative loose enough to accomodate his wily characters' rapid breathing. As in his feature début, Pigalle, Dridi shows his skill as a director lies in understanding a place that is not just about beautiful landscapes or heroic individuals, but about architecture peopled with life. Instead of gutless prosletyzing, Dridi gives us a screen that shimmers with characters that are as nuanced, provocative and distinctly urban as the mean streets they survive. - Lawrence Chua Questions: 1. Every Frenchman would notice the choice of automobiles chosen by Dridi, Ismaël's pififul (but as sober and resistant as a camel) 2 CV Citroën vs. Ludo's showy Citroën DS 19 (pronounced "déesse" = goddess). What's the obvious symbolism? 2. What's "a Beur" in French? What's the origin of this back slang word? 3. Mouloud tags a "Bye" on his brother's 2CV. Bye to what? Why does he want to go to Spain? 4. To those who have seen Hate (La Haine), which one of the two movies would you recommend? Writing Assignement: Your overall personal reaction to Bye Bye. ---------------------------------------------- 11. L.626, 1992 - A Film of Bertrand Tavernier Introduction: Docu-drama in Police and L.627 In the 1980s, a new element was added to the urban setting characteristic of the polar: 'What does get introduced into this landscape as a signifier of Frenchness is the drug underworld almost always associated with an Arab "community"'. This is true of Swaim's La Balance (1982) as well as the less overtly racist portrayal of an Arab drugs ring in Pialat's Police (1985) and of African drug users in Tavernier's L.627 (1992). Both films use exactly the same setting as La Balance - the streets of Belleville - but are shot in a resolutely naturalistic manner. Maurice Pialat trained as a painter, and began making films in 1960. Much of his work, including Passe ton Bac d'abord (1979) and Loulou (1980), is strongly influenced by documentary cinema, rejecting the theatrical values of mise en scène for shaky, dull-toned photography shot in real locations. Pialat has said of this naturalist aesthetic that 'perhaps because of my early career as a painter, I refused for many years to try to make my films pictorially interesting', although this subsequently changed in Sous le Soleil de Satan (1987) and Van Gogh (1991). Police is the last of Pialat's broadly naturalistic films: sound-track music is absent until the very end, there are no opening credits, the dialogue seems improvised, the camera work is often hand held and the locations naturally lit. Mangin (Gérrard Depardieu) is a detective investigating a Tunisian drugs ring in Belleville run by Simon Slimane and his brothers. Mangin arrests both Simon and his girl-friend Noria (Sophie Marceau), but thanks to the efforts of the lawyer Lambert (Richard Anconina), Noria is released. Although Noria now starts seeing Lambert, Mangin's best friend, the detective falls for her too. With the disruption of the drugs ring, Noria steals the gang's money and is only persuaded to give it back by Mangin, with whom she has begun an affair. Mangin returns the money, and Noria leaves him. The supposedly realistic portrayal of police brutality, racism and chauvinism which typifies most of the film has attracted more critical attention than its relation to the thriller form. But clearly some elements in Police are generic, above all the relationship between Mangin and Noria. He, a widower, is the classic lone cop, while she is characterised misogynistically as a femme fatale who lies to get what she wants, seduces men, and breaks up the buddy relationship between Mangin and Lambert. The narrative is also analogous to the modern gangster film, particularly Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), in its thematic concern with redemption. Despite his betrayal of Lambert, Mangin ultimately returns the stolen money to the Slimane brothers (who were holding Lambert responsible), thus at once saving his friend and reaffirming his own position on the right side of the law. (The distinction between law and criminality is blurred throughout the film, with Mangin and Lambert accusing each other of 'crossing over to the other side'.) Mangin's action, and his acceptance of Noria's subsequent departure, is coded as an almost spiritual achievement by the burst of music - Górecki's Third Symphony - as he stands alone at the end of the film. The title of Bertrand Tavernier's L.627 refers to the legislation against dealing in narcotics. The film was co-written by Michel Alexandre, an investigating officer who had worked in a Parisian drugs squad for thirteen years. Alexandre is also the model for the protagonist, Lulu (Didier Bezace), a detective transferred to an underfunded and overworked drugs squad. What little plot there is concerns Lulu's relationship with Cécile, a prostitute and informer who is HIV positive, and his unfulfilled ambition to escape from Paris for a pastoral life in the Auvergne. But in the main the film is a docu-drama about police methods, and about attitudes to race, ranging from the relatively enlightened (Lulu) to the bigoted (Dodo). Although the action includes chases and arrests, there is also a degree of monotony and repetition, and the generic form of the crime narrative - the solving of a mystery - is absent: 'I needed a structure that did not seem "constructed", which would remain "accidental", raw'. Tavernier's aim was to integrate 'fictional elements and research materials, without recourse to a plot [...]. This approach gave rise to a whole series of reflections and questions about the relation between fiction and documentary, truth and realism'. Above all the film was to 'refuse all stylistic effects inherent in the thriller genre' and to subvert the audience's formal and ideological references, 'American references in particular: promotion of individualism, rejection of collective spirit, predominance of plot'. To this end, Tavernier presents the police as a team working together; Lulu is not the traditional lone cop of film noir or of polars such as Police. A documentary atmosphere is achieved by the casting of little-known actors and the use of hand-held cameras to film in sometimes dangerous Parisian locations. The lighting is natural, and often gloomy. Unlike Police, however, L.627 does feature a substantial amount of sound-track music, with Philippe Sarde's score mixing Western and African instruments. Situating L.627 in the tradition of the political polar, Tavernier has claimed that the film was an attempt to define the state of French society. The hostile reception it met with from the police authorities confirmed him in this belief. In September 1992, Interior Minister Paul Quilès, ordered that Tavernier's co-writer Michel Alexandre be investigated, declared that the film was an 'unjust and false caricature' of policing, and cancelled a public discussion due to be held after a screening in Lille. More than two years later, Quilès's successor as Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, demanded that all material relating to L.627 be removed from an exhibition about films on police work. All of which, combined with with the increased ferocity of police operations in the area where the film was shot, led Tavernier to conclude that his didacticism was lost on the authorities: 'The boys at the Ministry have become like Dodo [the racist detective] in the film. And I had hoped they might follow the example of Lulu.² © Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema, pp. 116-118) L.627 In short: - A political film; - A work of fiction, hence not a documentary, but shaped by Tavernier's own commitment to show reality as he sees it; - A "family affair". A quote from BertrandTavernier: "The film doesn't plead for a more repressive policy [toward drug dealers], but shows what is being asked of people who don't have the means nor the power to fight against those who break the law. I don't have a solution to offer. I only show what I¹ve been able to see with my own eyes. When I spoke with [former] Prime Minister Laurent Fabius about the reality of drugs and how they're being sold just outside schools, he shut me off to tell me that I was expected to talk to him about important matters. Well, I made this film because Fabius said such a thing to me." L. 627 shows a lack of government action to deal efficiently with drugs in France, not only because government officials refuse to face the problem but also because they want to be "politically correct". Again, here is quote from Tavernier: "Yes, most dealers are either blacks or Arabs. This is what I witnessed. This is the reality. But because the government wants to be politically correct, it won't put a black person in an embarrassing situation for fear of a reaction from the minority. In the film [however], I've made sure that the word 'immigrant' is never pronounced, only the word 'dealer'. I've also made sure that in the arrest scenes, the viewer doesn't experience any special feeling of exaltation." [my translation]. It is also important to know that Tavernier's own son, Nils, who plays the role of Vincent, a future narcotics inspector, was himself involved with drugs and he's the one, who, once cured from addiction, introduced his father to detective Michel Alexandre, the film's co-writer. In addition, Alexandre himself in his young days had gone to IDHEC [a top film school in Paris].Therefore, the role played by Lucien, a.k.a. Lulu, corresponds exactly to Alexandre's real life activities when he was a Paris cop. At a cinematographic level, we have in the association of Lulu and his movie camera, a constant theme in Tavernier's films, what he calls ³l¹homme-caméra². The filmmaker must hide [as we see at the very beginning of the film, when Lulu is filming a drug deal hidden in the 'sub' (the police truck)] in order to capture the reality. In other words, reality can be perfectly described only when the filmmaker [Tavernier] and the actor [Lulu-cum-camera] are viewing things with the same eyes. Synopsis Thirty-five-year-old Lucien "Lulu" Marguet has worked for fifteen years as an investigator in the Seventh Division of the Paris Police. During a surveillance operation, Lulu makes contact with "un cousin² (police slang for informer), Willy, to gather information about a forthcoming crack consignment. The stakeout is interrupted by Lulu's superior, who calls in the one observation vehicle at Lulu's disposal before the operation can be completed. Furious, Lulu returns to headquarters where he accuses his chief of drunken incompetence. As a result, he is transferred to a desk job at another station. While in clerical limbo, Lulu receives a call from another 'cousin', Cécile, a young drug-addicted prostitute who is HIV-positive, and for whom Lulu feels a protective affection. They arrange to meet at the Père-Lachaise cemetery where, facing a memorial stone to the victims of a terrorist attack on an airliner, Lulu makes it clear to Cécile that he considers dealers to be terrorists and that they should be dealt with accordingly. Through the intervention of Commissioner Adore, Lulu is transferred to a neighbouring division where he is integrated into a newly established team dealing exclusively with drug-related crime. The chief of "les stupes (from the French for narcotics, stupéfiants), Dominique "Dodo" Cantoni, is concerned more with filling a quota of convictions than with the penetration of trafficking rings. In the course of a series of raids, Lulu discovers that his commitment is at odds with the lackadaisical approaches of Dodo and his colleague Manuel, but he is supported by Marie, the deputy-chief and Antoine, who becomes Lulu's partner. The differences within the group come to a head when Dodo, Manuel and Vincent, the youngest 'stupe' and a police-college graduate, carry out a raid on a squat without their colleagues'knowledge. Although intended to net a dealer, the raid succeeds only in unearthing a user, a young immigrant mother, whom Dodo arrests. Lulu and Antoine hurry to the scene where they attempt to placate the inhabitants, while berating Dodo. Soon afterwards, Lulu learns that Willy, his key informant, is hiding in fear for his life. Lulu seeks him out to rassure him of his protection, but later learns that Willy has suffered a savage knife attack after his whereabouts is divulged by Dodo to a gang of dealers. Still in pursuit of the same dealers, the team is staking out a café when Lulu, inside an observation van, spots Cécile, on the street. Having been unable to locate her for over a year, Lulu aban dons his post to speak to her. She is with her new-born child and informs Lulu that she intends to leave Paris. The team is about to set out after the dealers, and Lulu, hurriedly bidding Cécile goodbye, rejoins them. Back in the van, he realizes that he has forgotten to ask Cécile for her new address. Reviews Taking its title from the article of the French Code of Public Health that forbids ³all offences linked to the possession, traffic and consumption of narcotics", L.627 was co-written by an ex-stupe: Michel Alexandre, whose collaboration presumably ensures an authenticity of detail and tone in the film's study of Parisian plain-clothes drug investigators. Released in France the same week as the Maastricht Referendum, Tavernier's film is an ambitious examination of 'the state of the nation' in the guise of a policier. As such, L.627 occupies the same territory as Bob Swaim's La Balance (1982), Maurice Pialat's Police (1982 and Catherine Breillat's Sale comme un ange (1991), although it is, by comparison, occupied by resolutely 'second-string' performers. Didier Bezace is outstanding as Lulu, the tenacious and committed investigator whose calm resourcefulness and often sentimental attachment to his 'cousins' succeeds where the blustering tactics of the team's chief, "Dodo" Cantoni - played by Jean-Paul Comart as an overgrown adolescent, complete with hyena cackle and water pistol - fail to do anything other than fulfill the statistical requirements imposed by the Ministry of the Interior. This casting strategy is of a piece with the film's overall style, which opts for an anti-climactic, quasi-behaviourist realism, which concentrates on context and milieu rather than on a lone-vigilante cop. Doggedly unglamorous, both in terms of character and location, L.627 studies police procedure at the desk, on the street, in interrogations, and has several strong set-pieces, all of them emphatically focused on the work of surveillance and raids. Tavernier adopts the point of view of the police, a tactic carried over from his previous film La Guerre sans nom (1991), a documentary on the Algerian War seen from the perspective of French soldiers. But he does so un-indulgently, concentrating on "les stupes" as a unit existing between official indifference and street-level trauma. What defines L.627's realist method - as well as its shortcomings - is Lulu's video-camera. Used off-duty to film weddings, it becomes an instrument of surveillance on stakeouts. The video images mark a kind of zero-degree realism that the film can only aspire to and approximate in a scrupulous and unflinching pursuit of the authentic details of street-level police procedure. The video image acts as a reflexive comment on the difficulties of simplicity, a directorial acknowledgement of the drawbacks of realism. Tavernier's method is, on the whole, judicious; putting the hot subject of drugs, and the racial networks associated with them, in the 'cool' frame of a procedural policier. When Lulu comments, "I have the impression that filming helps me understand things better", it is tempting to take this as the director's own statement of intent - that audiences will confront their prejudices through his film. L.627 is a consciously micro-political exploration of urban France at a point when the grand idea of 'Europe' no longer conceals the absence of political will to deal with domestic social devastation. - Chris Darke, © Sight & Sound ... Et en français... L.627 pourrait être un des meilleurs Taverniers... si Tavernier n'était pas si bon. C'est pas la peine que je vous raconte l'histoire ? Vous la connaissez, sinon celle du film vous connaissez celle de la réalité. En gros, c'est la vie d'un flic. Un flic qui n'a pas de chance. Parce qu'il est consciencieux. Et dans ce job-là, lorsqu'on a envie que les choses se passent comme il faut, ça doit pas être facile. Sur ce point d'ailleurs L627 se rapproche plus qu'on ne pourrait le croire de "ça commence aujourd'hui". Parce que ce n'est pas facile non plus d'être enseignant, de nos jours, lorsqu'on a envie que les choses se passent comme il faut. Les flics comme les enseignants souffrent d'une vilaine image de marque. [...] Ce que j'aime le plus chez lui, c'est sa façon de filmer au plus près de la réalité. (Et ce que j'aime le moins, c'est quand il dit : "On savait déjà faire du cinéma avant Tarantino". On peut admirer à la fois Tavernier et Tarantino, ce n'est pas interdit, même que ça existe, j'en suis la preuve.) Dans ce registre, L627 est une petite merveille. On s'y croit tellement qu'illico on n'a plus envie d'être flic, pour peu qu'on ait voulu s'identifier à Starski et Hutch. Dès les premières images, on est immergé dans l'ambiance fonds-de-tiroir de la police, où tout déconne, tout foire, et sans que ça soit pour de faux, comme d'habitude au cinéma. Ici, c'est un univers de batailles perdues, de paroles en l'air. La came, les problèmes d'intégration, les dessous de table, la prostitution, le racket... Avec au milieu de tout ce malström de la vie moderne, un pauvre flic, qui filme sa femme au lieu de lui donner de son temps, qui protège ses indics comme il peut, et qui tombe amoureux là où il ne le faut pas. Bref, la vie, comme si vous y étiez. A sa sortie, le film a souffert de préjugés racistes, parce qu'il mettait en scène des "truands" qui souvent étaient black ou beurre. Comme d'habitude dans ces cas là, les préjugés ont oublié de remarquer que les blancs, qu'ils soient flics, chefs, ou simples épiciers, n'en prenaient pas moins pour leur matricule ; simplement, à une échelle plus subtile, subtilité qui, il faut le reconnaître, n'est pas le fort des spécialistes ès préjugés. Mais je ne veux pas rentrer dans le débat. L'immigration et les xénoproblèmes sont des sujets compliqués à traiter, où les mots font plus mal qu'ailleurs, et ratent très souvent leur cible ; chacun est libre de penser ce qu'il en veut. Je crois pour ma part que ni Tavernier ni son film ne sont, et en aucun cas, "racistes", comme pourrait en témoigner par ailleurs le téléfilm sur les banlieues qu'il a réalisé sur la lancée de L627, en grande partie pour répondre aux critiques mesquines. - Dom http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dom666/12l627.htm Some Questions: 1. L. 627 is a ³politically incorrect² film in several ways. Which ones, for example? 2. There are several differences between this film and most American cop shows. Can you point out some of these differences? 3. Please, comment on Tavernier, "l'homme-caméra" (as exemplified by Lulu) and the following important trademark of Tavernier's cinema: "Reality can be perfectly described only when the filmmaker and the actor are viewing things with the same eyes." 4. Trivia: Where = in what well-known place in Paris do Lulu and Cécile meet in Paris? Do you remember the specific location? Writing Assignement: Your overall personal reaction to L.627 ---------------------------------------------- 12. La Promesse The Promise. A film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996 Synopse du film Igor travaille comme apprenti dans un garage mais il aide surtout son père qui héberge des étrangers clandestins. Son père les exploite et les fait travailler au noir. Il les loge dans des taudis et leur fait payer des sommes incroyables. Igor aide mais n'approuve pas son père. Il n'est d'ailleurs pas à sa place dans ce milieu car il n'a que 14 ans. Un jour, l'un des ouvriers clandestins, Amidou, dégringole de l'échaffaudage et se tue. Mais avant de mourir il a fait promettre à Igor de s'occuper de sa femme et de son enfant. Roger, le père d'Igor, n'est pas au courant de cette promesse et dissimule le corps d'Amidou pour ne pas avoir de problème. Il fait ensuite croire à la femme d'Amidou que ce dernier est parti pour fuir des dettes. Roger se rend compte qu'Igor veille sur Assita et lui interdit de l'approcher. Un jour pourtant, Igor tient sa promesse et défie son père. La Promesse ou l¹éveil d'une conscience La Promesse, un film de Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne, relate l'initiation à la conscience morale d'un garcon de quinze ans qui exploite, avec son père, un réseau de main-d'oeuvre immigrée clandestine. La Promesse, qui a été tourné en Belgique en 1996 et coproduit par ce pays avec la France, le Luxembourg et la Tunisie, est le troisième long métrage de fiction de deux cinéastes formés à la riche école du documentaire‹école de probité - en cela que le genre même qu'elle illustre oblige ceux qui la pratiquent à se poser quelques questions fondamentales vis-à-vis de leur sujet, particulierement si celui-ci.touche à l'humain ou à des problèmes de société. C'est précisément ce qui se passe avec La Promesse, qui retrace, selon les propres termes de ses auteurs, ³l'initiation à la conscience morale d'un garçon de quinze ans, exploitant avec son père un réseau de main-d'oeuvre immigrée clandestine.² Le problème social qu'aborde le film est particulièrement aigu dans l'Europe des Quinze, mirage du Nord pour un Sud en manque endémique de travail rémunérateur ; mais il peut très aisément être transposé sous nos latitudes sans que son acuité et les prolongements moraux qu'il induit en perdent le moins du monde de leur actualité et de leur intérêt. Montrer la vie au plus juste Le jeune héros de La Promesse, Igor, confronté pour la première fois de sa vie à un problème de justice élémentaire et de conscience individuelle par un pur enchaînement de circonstances (son père qui vit du commerce douteux du travail clandestin n'est pas directement la cause de la tragédie qui va bouleverser leur vie), va découvrir en lui-même sous nos yeux les enseignements fondamentaux de cette conscience morale qui est comme la charpente de toute vie humaine digne de ce nom. La promesse qu'il a faite à un mourant, un immigré africain clandestin tombé d'un échafaudage, il l'a faite.sans avoir le temps d'y penser ou d'en mesurer les conséquences sur la vie de l'adolescent très ordinaire à partir d'une peinture sans joliesse comme sans sévérité inutile de faits très ordinaires, d'assister à l'éclosion de cette consciece. Et le sentiment que cette éclosion provoque chez le spectacteur est un sentiment très rare de jubilation intérieure, comme un don fait à notre intelligence par deux cinéastes en prise directe avec leur temps. Plénitude du film et impression de vérité Que Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne soient par ailleurs parfaitement à l'aise pour diriger un ensemble de personnages dont des acteurs non-professionnels aussi bien que des comédiens de métier assument l'identite à l¹écran, n'est pas un facteur indifferent à la plénitude du film ni a l'impression de vérité qui s'en dégage. Le style de leur mise en scène est exemplaire dans sa modestie, dans une simplicité voulue qui ne distrait jamais de l¹essentiel qui est de montrer la vie au plus juste des individus et des circonstances. Un mot s'impose à la fin de la projection: authenticité. Authenticité dans la peinture d'une violence sociale très contemporaine et qui nous touchent tous, authentcité surtout, dans celle de sentiments humains qui nous réunissent et qui sont à travers ce film un message d'espoir comme le cinéma nous en donne rarement.. © France-Amérique - Par Jean VALLIER - 17-23 mai, 1997 Reviews Moral Rebellion at Heart of 'La Promesse' Morality is a given in the movies; everyone, even the worst of creatures, knows if they're bad or good. In "La Promesse," an exceptional film from Belgium, all of that is reversed as a sense of right and wrong struggles to emerge in a young man who never knew there was a difference. The conflicts involved are intense and absorbing, proving that compelling moral dilemmas make for the most dramatic cinema. An exciting discovery at both last year's Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, "La Promesse" makes being politically relevant and philosophically thoughtful so simple and involving that the story seems to be telling itself. Written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, a pair of filmmaking brothers, it is made with such unobtrusive sureness that it's able to exert great power without forcing anything. Though relatively new to features, the Dardenne brothers have 20 years of documentary work in Belgium behind them, and their use of hand-held cameras and probing close-ups gives "La Promesse" the urgency and immediacy of total authenticity. Toss in unknown but persuasive actors and characters whose reality is unmistakable and you get an idea why this film is as bracing as it is. "La Promesse" is set on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Liège and centers on a 15-year-old apprentice auto mechanic named Igor . An opportunistic sneak thief and smooth liar, Igor is like a small animal with dirty blond hair, casually amoral because in his world the opposite has never been presented as an option. Igor's universe is completely controlled by his father, Roger (Belgian stage actor Olivier Gourmet). A pudgy, bearded and petty despot, Roger has a lie or a threat or a beating for every occasion. Hot-tempered, violent, a master of casual betrayals, Roger puts together scams without end, but he also cares for his son and values their almost symbiotic relationship. Roger's business is dealing in illegal immigrants--Turks, Ghanaians, Romanians and Koreans--who sneak into Belgium looking for a better life. Roger hides them in a clandestine rooming house, charging them exorbitant fees for false identity papers while collaborating with the police when a raid is needed to satisfy the local politicians. In all of this, Igor, made in his father's image and hardened by sharing his lifestyle, is a willing second-in-command. Part man, part boy, he spends the spare moment when he's not conniving with the old man putting together a go-kart with his young friends. Igor's life begins to change when Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) and her small child arrive from Burkina Faso to join husband and father Hamidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo) in Roger's boarding house. Assita's individuality intrigues Igor, and then a jolt of fate shoves their lives closer. Hamidou has an accident working illegally, Roger refuses to take him to the hospital, and he dies after making Igor agree to take care of his wife and child, the promise of the title. It's difficult to do justice to how subtly the film develops from here, how unflinching it depends on documentary-style realism and expressive faces to make its points. Though the question of romance never arises, Igor becomes increasingly protective of Assita, which puts him in conflict with his father, the only person who's ever cared about him. It's a predicament that is as difficult as it is compelling. "La Promesse's" actors have differing levels of experience, with Jérémie Renier, an impressive natural, having the least and Assita Ouedraogo (whose first trip to Europe was to make this film) having appeared in three films of fellow countryman Idrissa Ouedraogo. But they all work so seamlessly here we feel we're eavesdropping on a moral rebellion that is being played out for the highest possible stakes. Among the many things it does right, "La Promesse" refuses to even consider glib solutions. This film understands that moral choices are a painful, troublesome business, that decisions to do the right thing are not simple to take and hardly make things easier. Nothing in life takes more courage, and no kind of filmmaking offers greater rewards. By Kennth Turan - Times Film Critic Another Review La Promesse, a rare import from Belgium, indicates how grim the mood of a film can become when there's almost no comic relief. Excepting one or two moments of gallows humor, there's little to break the relentlessly bleak tone. Fortunately, the script is written with such intelligence and the characters are developed so believably that, irrespective of the downbeat approach (or, perhaps, because of it), it's difficult not to be moved by the plight of 15-year old Igor (an unforced performance by newcomer Jérémie Renier), who is trapped into choosing between his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), and the demands of his conscience. When the film opens, Igor is already wise beyond his years. He's an active participant in his father's shady, "immigration service" business. Roger is one of those crooks who makes his money by preying on the desperation of others. For exorbitant fees, he smuggles illegal immigrants into Belgium, forges false work permits for them, and sets them up in slum-like apartments (for which he charges unreasonably high rents). Many of the immigrants also work at Roger's construction site, where they are paid a pittance for hard, occasionally-dangerous work. Igor, who also works as an apprentice at a garage, serves as his father's assistant, and has learned to lie, cheat, and steal just as well as his old man. In addition to being a criminal, Roger is also a bully. When his son does something to displease him, he beats him mercilessly. Despite all that, there's little doubt that he loves Igor, although he's unable to express his affection effectively. In addition, he has trained himself to objectify the men and women he smuggles into the country, adopting the same basic philosophy as the Belgian police: "Illegals don't exist." To Roger, the immigrants are a less-than-human source of income, and that is a philosophy he attempts to pass on. (This reminded me of a subplot in John Singleton's Rosewood in which a father taught racism to his son.) Dad's lessons are leaving an impression upon Igor until an event occurs that forces him to re- evaluate what he has learned. One of Roger's workers, Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo), falls from a scaffold and is critically injured. As he lies dying, he extracts a promise from Igor to care for his wife, Assita (played with quiet dignity by Assita Ouedraogo), and infant boy, both newly arrived from Bugina Faso. Rather than taking Amidou to a hospital (where all sorts of difficult questions would arise), Roger elects to let the man bleed to death, then buries him under a thick layer of cement. He encourages Igor to forget the incident, but the boy cannot, and his attempts to honor his promise to the dying Amidou generate friction between himself and his father. Worse still, Assita is often a grudging, if not openly unwilling, recipient of Igor's aid. Essentially, La Promesse is a variation of that motion picture staple, the "coming of age" story. The difference here, however, is that the choices faced by Igor are more complex than is the norm. Becoming an adult does not mean, as his father asserts, learning how to drive and "getting laid" -- it means assessing the value of his word and heeding the call of his conscience, regardless of the price. No matter what Igor does, he will betray someone -- the crux of the matter for him is determining which betrayal he can live with. Although La Promesse presents a resolution, it makes it clear that there are no easy answers for Igor or for us. As directed by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (who have been making documentaries in their native country for more than two decades), La Promesse has a "you are there" style that favors a cinema vérité approach to polished photography. In concert with a quartet of natural performances and a persuasive, insightful script, this method results in a film that one could easily accept as non-fiction. Indeed, while this particular story is an invention of the writer/directors, a host of universal truths can be found just beneath the surface. La Promesse is designed to challenge an audience. There are numerous instances throughout when viewers will find themselves wondering what they would do in similar circumstances. On each of these occasions, the directors proceed in a logical, intelligent manner, and rarely stray into melodrama (although there are a few minor slips here and there). Despite being a low-key production, La Promesse speaks volumes about how we treat other human beings and what it means to truly grow up. - © 1997 James Berardinelli Another Review Those whose Latin extends beyond "E Pluribus Unum" might just remember "homo homini lupus" (man is a wolf to man). That's what the first part of "La Promesse" tells us. But it is followed by "homo homini agnus" (man is a lamb to man). At least that's my reading of the third feature by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. The movie, premiered in a parallel section of the 1996 Cannes Festival, has been highly praised by American reviewers. It is mostly set in or near the city of Liège (Belgium). It is essentially a two plus two character drama. The first duo consists of young Igor and his father Roger. Igor is 15 -- as per information I gleaned in various documents. (The film proper is rather frustratingly vague about times, places and other factual information). The boy, already a heavy smoker and beer guzzler, but still a virgin, is something of a Peeping Tom, works in a gas station as an apprentice mechanic. He swipes the customers' wallets and shows up at the station fitfully --which results in his dismissal. Igor is his father's main helper in an illegal operation of illegal immigrant workers, African, Eastern European, Korean, etc., whom the ring, for a high price, spirits into Belgium hidden inside automobiles carries on car-transport vehicles. Then Roger, charging outrageously again, gets the immigrants fake papers and houses them in stinking, disgusting hovels within decrepit buildings. The traffickers know no decency. When, for example, there is political pressure on the gang, the operators sacrifice some of the aliens by pretending they'll be sent to America (after due payment), but betray them to the authorities. The story then focuses on an African couple (Amidou and Assita) and their baby. Amidou, working for Roger, falls off a scaffolding and dies, but not before exacting from Igor the promise that he will watch over Assita and her child. Since the body would cause an investigation, father and son dispose of it by burial in concrete. (It was unclear to me whether or not Amidou might have survived if taken to a hospital -- which Roger refused to do as unsafe for his business. So Amidou's death, may have to a killing by omission). The man's death is not revealed to his wife. She is told instead that Amidou had disappeared, run off perhaps to avoid paying debts. Roger now tries to get rid of Assita by sending her to nearby Cologne (Germany) where he would arrange for the woman to work as a prostitute. About 40 minutes into the movie, Igor begins to feel pangs of guilt that keep increasing. He defies his father and attempts to come to the woman's help. The process of a rising conscience and consciousness takes up the rest of the film. It is intermingled with some local touches of racism and xenophobia. The entire process is filmed like a documentary, with a constantly mobile, moving and often handheld camera. There is obviously a desire by the filmmakers to keep a realistic look and tone, which is understandable and adds power to the movie. This technique is valid in principle. It distances the work from the smooth and slick Hollywood-type films. But it often goes overboard and could induce fatigue in the viewers. A modicum of using the Steadycam system might have helped. ( This gyroscope-like method, introduced in the mid-70s, puts a special harness on the operator and allows moving the machine without jiggling). The episodes are done with naturalness, economical dialogue and no traditional verbal elaboration. The burden is on telling details, on implications and on the facial expressions of the performers. Roger, and above all Igor, acquit themselves nicely, with the latter's gradual transformation following a credible development. "La Promesse" is as far as one can go from commercial movies. It is well-meaning but also well-handled, never showing any traces of glop, sentimentalizing or romanticizing. Among its virtues is that if you imagine that this subject had been filmed in routine ways, it might have made of Assita a colorful --perhaps even wise -- character. Here, she is rather attractive but, like her drab surroundings, a sad figure. In a good touch, to find out if her husband is alive or dead, she consults the entrails of a chicken and later is taken by an older African lady to a witch doctor. Both Assita and Amidou come from Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta), a small, poor country where, surprisingly, there is Africa's greatest ferment of movie-making, partly encouraged by the regular Pan African festivals in Ouagadougou, the capital. Director Idrissa Ouedraogo, a winner of major awards (e.g. at Cannes) is widely known internationally. Their real family names of Assita and Amidou are also Ouedraogo. It must be Burkina Faso's equivalent of Smith or Jones or else Idrissa's dozens of relatives have made it in cinema. A year or two ago, when Idrissa's latest film was shown at the Cannes Festival, the credits had such an unending list of Ouedraogos that at the press screening the critics kept bursting into laughter exponentially. - © Edwin Jahiel Questions: 1. Develop Berdinelli's remark who states in his review that "La Promesse is designed to challenge an audience". In what ways? 2. What visual mpressions do we get of the part of Belgium (near Liège, in Walloon = French-speaking region) where the film is being made? 3. Igor, as well observed by Jahiel, is steretyoped with two typical Belgian traits. What are they? Writing Assignement: Your overall personal reaction to La Promesse ---------------------------------------------- 13. The Closet (Le placard). A film by Francis Veber, 2000 Laughs galore in this smash-hit French film. France¹s finest leading men - Daniel Auteuil and Gérard Depardieu - join forces with the writer of the classic La Cage Aux Folles to create a brilliant comedy of errors. François (Auteuil), is a dull middle manager in a condom factory whose life is thrown into turmoil when he finds out that he¹s about to be sacked. In a desperate attempt to save his job he is persuaded to pretend to be gay. Suddenly everyone¹s seeing François in an altogether different and interesting new light - much to the annoyance of Félix, the homophobic head of personnel... Film Reviews Witty as it is, "The Closet" has serious points to make at the expense of political correctness, hypocrisy, and the lengths we go not to appear prejudiced. Witness Depardieu, who drives himself mad - literally - trying to mask his true feelings. The actor, who had a heart attack just before shooting started, has seldom been better. But then everyone is on top form in a comedy of manners which proves, yet again, that France has the finest farceurs in the world. - Neil Smith The basic story, clear and simple is that of Francois Pignon (the same name as the protagonist's in "The Dinner Game,") played by Daniel Auteuil. For 20 years he has worked as an accountant in a super-modern firm of rubber items, especially condoms. Francois has been a good employee but his personality is, to say the least, unremarkable. He blends in with the wallpaper, so to speak. And he is something of a sad sack these days because his wife had left him and their teen-age boy studiously avoids him. He finds that Dad is "chiant," a strong French word for "supremely dull." Unexpectedly, the firm decides to retrench -minimally that is--which means that just one employee will be let go. François find out that he is that person. What with his gloom about his ex-wife and his son, François goes to his apartment and contemplates suicide. A new, older neighbor comes to the rescue. This wise man thinks up a way to save François's job: make the firm believe that François is gay. Firing him would be politically incorrect, perhaps bring on a lawsuit, certainly create much bad publicity to the firm. How this is done is an utter delight, but I will not spoil it for my readers. Suffice it to state that there are laughs galore, that the acting is first-class, that François never adopts any gay characteristics, that the technical aspects are excellent, the music first-rate and appropriate, and that there is, in the cast, the loveliest Scottish kitten you'll ever see. All the details are perfect and planned with energy as well as superior clarity throughout the delicious twists of characters and plot. The tempo is perfect. Everything moves fast, but not in a speeded-up way. The camera and the editing know when to mini-linger, when to cut away. Daniel Auteuil is a great performer. So is Gérard Depardieu. In a most un-Hollywoodian way, those superstars are not exactly pretty fellows-- to put it mildly. But then there is the unspoken, humanizing French tradition of often using leading as well as supporting actors who are not beauty kings -- call it the Michel Simon syndrome. Depardieu's role here is a supporting one, and that's the sign of real trouper. He plays the factory's most openly homophobic employee, a man hoisted on his own pétard who ends up as a simpatico character. More I cannot disclose. See for yourself. - Edwin Jahiel Another Review What happens when you find yourself watching an ostensibly "gay movie" in which only one gay character appears, and in a secondary role? Does it still qualify? And what, exactly, constitutes a lesbian or gay film anyway? The answers to these questions are, of course, complicated and related to each other. These questions are further complicated by Francis Veber's new French bedroom farce, The Closet. The film demonstrates just how a movie may be directly concerned with questions of sexual minority rights and social enfranchisement, without being overtly "gay," in terms of featuring stereotypical characters, visual homoerotics, outraged/morose AIDS sentiment, a camp sensibility, or all the above. The Closet attests to the cultural and political advances made by sexual minorities in the recent past in being a gay movie almost entirely evacuated of gay characters. In fact, Veber is no stranger to "gay films" that are a bellwether of the changing place of sexual minorities in and in relation to "mainstream"/heterosexual communities. He wrote the original screen version of La Cage Aux Folles, as well as its U.S. version, directed by Mike Nichols, The Birdcage. Both of these films (despite embracing I would call some pretty terminal clichés about gay folk) can be read as reflective and productive of both heterosexual perceptions of gayness as "lifestyle" and as community. And the same can be said for The Closet. You see, The Closet isn't so much (or at all, really) about queer people living queer lives in queer communities, but rather about some of the ways in which gayness functions as a social category. More to the point, the film is about how gayness is experienced, interpreted, and "made sense of" by non-gay individuals and communities. At the same time that gay individuals and cultures are disappeared from most of The Closet, the film recognizes that even if sexual minorities have become politically and legally enfranchised in most Western nations, overt homophobia, social intolerance, and physical violence against gays and lesbians continues to be a fact of daily life in these same countries. The pervasive threat of homophobia and violence experienced by many gay men and women every day suffuses The Closet and the new "gay" life of its hero. François Pignon (Daniel Auteuil) is a staff accountant at a prophylactic factory. Sounds like the start of some sexy romp, no? Well, Pignon (as he is called by everyone in the film) is actually something of a bore. His wife left him two years prior, claiming he was a "drag" and taking their teenage son with her. He's been working the same job for twenty years, but times being what they are, the company is in the process of downsizing, and Pignon finds himself about to be jobless in addition to wife-less and family-less. As he considers throwing himself off his high-rise balcony, he's interrupted by his new neighbor, an older gent named Belone (Michel Aumont). After hearing of Pignon's woes, Belone devises a plan for him to at least keep his job: he's to start a rumor that he is gay and don't do anything to deny it, that way the company won't fire him for fear of a sexual discrimination lawsuit. To help him, Belone offers to digitize Pignon's face onto some photos of leather-boys in compromising positions he has handy, and to mail them to Pignon's boss anonymously. When Pignon protests that he isn't gay, Belone assures him that the fact is immaterial; all that matters is that other people believe he is gay. Pignon's enactment of "being gay" proceeds not as some flamboyant "flamer," which would be, according to Belone, "vulgar in the extreme," but rather by behaving in the same manner as he always has, and letting his co-workers and family read him how they will in light of this new information. Belone is exactly right, and this is The Closet's most pointed insight. While identity is personal, it is also intersubjective; while it is a function of who/what we claim to be, it is also produced by external interpretation. This is not necessarily news. Anyone who is non-traditionally gendered -- whether gay, straight or otherwise sexually inclined -- can tell of the harassment, bullying, and violence they suffer at the hands of peers who perceive them to be "gay." Still, it's a revelation to Pignon, who experiences all this firsthand, perhaps most acutely when two macho co-workers, threatened by the presence of a presumably gay man in their midst, follow him home one evening and bash him in the parking garage of his apartment building. Belone's insight into how our own identities are experienced through other people's reactions and interpretations is exactly right. He is, after all, the film's single gay character and thus, I suppose more familiar with identity politics. And as an older man (in his early 60s would be my guess), he has presumably endured the social and political changes affecting sexual minorities over the latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, when asked why he is being so helpful to Pignon, he replies that it is because, "thirty years ago, I was fired for the same thing that is going to save your job." Belone understands that today, being gay is no longer necessarily anathema to hetero-normative cultures. Of course, one of the film's blind spots is that this inclusiveness is really only for some gay men. It is questionable whether the "vulgar" flamer Belone speaks of, or an m-t-f trans individual might find the same congeniality among the managerial business culture of which Pignon is a part. Nonetheless, the effects of Pignon's "coming out" on this rather small and tight-knit business community are The Closet's primary concern, and provide its humor. Somewhat refreshingly, the film does not use gay characters acting like "flamers" for comic relief, but rather finds its humor in the spectacle of perplexed straight folk and how they relate personally to Pignon's "gayness." So, his Accounts Department co-worker Ariane (Armelle Deutsch) declares that she "always knew" he was gay, and that he is much more sexy and interesting now that he is out. His departmental boss, Mlle. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), while startled by the announcement, refuses to believe it and eventually becomes Pignon's love interest (hey, it's a romantic comedy, it's gotta have a love interest for our non-gay "gay" hero). The company CEO, Mr. Kopel (Jean Rochefort), initially flummoxed and homophobic, comes around to see that this turn of events can be an excellent marketing tool for a condom manufacturer, and commissions a float for the Paris Gay Pride Parade, atop of which he places Pignon. On seeing the parade on the news, Pignon's son Franck (Stanislas Creviller) experiences a renewed interest in his dad, whom he previously considered a dullard, to be avoided at all costs. The most complicated response to Pignon's "coming out" comes from his co-worker, Félix Santini (Gérard Depardieu). Santini is the captain of the company rugby team and an all-around homophobe with no time for "sissy" men. When he is advised by some practical jokester co-workers that if his phobic rants against Pignon continue, he will get himself fired, Santini sets out to befriend Pignon and ends up courting him (he takes Pignon to a fancy restaurant and buys him a pretty pink cashmere sweater). Santini's relationship to Pignon becomes increasingly complex and it seems that through Pignon, he will be able to come to grips with his own homosexuality; at least until Pignon rejects his suggestion that they move in together. Following this rejection, Felix breaks down and ends up institutionalized. Though he recovers and returns to work, Santini's "crisis of identity" is never resolved. But this is a good thing. Santini's homophobia (and homophobia in general) cannot be so simplistically resolved as repressed homosexuality, just as homosexuality (or sexual identity in general) cannot be so simplistically defined as the gender to whom we are attracted. Ambiguously "gay" from beginning to end, The Closet challenges easy definitions of what constitutes gay and lesbian film, and yet nevertheless comes off (at least for me) as a decidedly "gay" film. More importantly, The Closet makes no claims to show what gayness "is," but rather how it functions socially and politically, how it is interpreted and understood by non-gay people, and how that function is not produced by a singular or individual act but through the subjective interactions of all of "our" communities. - Todd R. Ramlow, PopMatters Film Critic Question: What pertinent comparisons can you establish between the three films (The Last Metro, French Twist, The Closet) we've screened where gayness and lesbianism are represented. Written Assignment: Please comment with appropriate illustrations on Todd Ramlow's conclusion, repeated here: Ambiguously "gay" from beginning to end, The Closet challenges easy definitions of what constitutes gay and lesbian film, and yet nevertheless comes off as a decidedly "gay" film. More importantly, The Closet makes no claims to show what gayness "is," but rather how it functions socially and politically, how it is interpreted and understood by non-gay people, and how that function is not produced by a singular or individual act but through the subjective interactions of all of "our" communities. ---------------------------------------------- 14. Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves), 1993. A Film by Cyril Collard (1957-1993) "AIDS, like tuberculosis in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is just a backdrop [in Savage Nights]. Jean's struggle with the illness is also a struggle with stupidity, with all sorts of racism, with tyranny... Jean acts as though nothing were different in his daily life. He continues to drink, laugh, and drive fast. In his own way, he is shattering the taboos. He doesn't let himself get locked into the status of being HIV-positive, like some people for whom the illness becomes a sort of identity card." - Cyril Collard, writer/director/actor, Savage Nights Cloaked in controversy because of its maker and star, Cyril Collard, died of AIDS just days after the film won the Cesar Award. Savage Nights is a story of passion and love in the age of HIV.  A bi-sexual photographer finds his life is shared by those he loves in a way that many would find unforgivable.  The film provokes and astonishes with its singular perspective;  it is all the more incendiary by being rooted in real life.  Film Reviews "I believe that AIDS is a kind of language, that it has something to tell us. It brings to the forefront all of the dysfunctions and aberrations of our society.'' Made shortly before his death of AIDS last year [1993], writer-director Cyril Collard's observation seems especially desperate and acute. It also *seems* true. What this movie does best though, is mess with what you think is "true.'' When he made and starred in "Savage Nights", Collard was dying. Everyone knew it then, and everyone knows it now: the fact of his death is included in the film's marketing, of course (how could it not be?); the fact of his death grounds the film's anger and power. Moreover, the fact of his death also drives the film's most urgent questions: what cultural assumptions and structures create "truth''? How is such the fiction that we call truth connected to experience? How is experience translated to representation? What is the "language'' of AIDS? Such language would seem too much to bear. And at a most basic level, "Savage Nights" thematizes excessiveness. Everything in this movie is too much. Both knowledge and fear of what's unknown are too much. Jean (Collard) is introduced knowing his HIV status, knowing that his death is imminent. This is nearly impossible to bear, as are the connections between Collard and Jean (an artist-writer-filmmaker in Paris). But these apparent intersections of life and fiction are immeasurable, too much to map: Jean is a character, with a script and coherence, while Collard's experience is almost beyond understanding, certainly beyond a framework of five acts, rising action with a climax. Jean is passionately committed to living, hard. He begins without a specific object for his passion. He has two lovers, an 18-year-old girl, Laura (Romane Bohringer), and Samy (Carlos Lopez), a married man increasingly attracted to dangerous sex and violence. Laura is middle-class, an aspiring actor who auditions for Jean. She falls for his dash, his romance, his sadness. She doesn't find out that he's positive, however, until after they have unprotected sex. In a scene that has received much critical and public attention (mostly negative), they fight and then go to bed: he reaches for the condom and she puts it aside. Laura's anger and pain are framed by her obsession with Jean, which is also an obsession with the romantic life and tragic death that he literally embodies. (He gazes into a mirror, wondering what is growing inside, destroying his beautiful body from within: the metaphor itself seems immoderate, too close.) Laura's addiction to love (masquerading as sex; she's an adolescent girl living at home with her mother) mirrors that of Maria Schneider in "Last Tango in Paris", and "Savage Nights" quotes liberally from Bertolucci, even including a scene where Laura attacks Jean much like Schneider attacked Brando, and Schneider herself as one of Jean's ex-lovers: her face-off with Laura is simultaneously petty and dramatic, exacerbating the tensions between life that surpasses comprehension and "Last Tango"'s now-legendary fantasy of excess. The twist (for lack of a better term) in "Savage Nights" is Jean/Collard's bisexuality. As the sign of this potentially radical collapse of conventional categories, Samy is charged with energy and compassion. His background is complex: his Spanish- speaking family is tightknit (they befriend Jean), his wife is hurt by his extramarital affairs. Eventually, Samy visits an underground sex club, tops in an s/m scene, and begins prowling the streets with a fascist-punk gang, looking for victims. The connections among his abusive behaviors, desire for pain, and his relationship with Jean are important; they demonstrate the overlapping of social dysfunctions and celebrations. If bisexuality in this film is premised on a predominantly heterosexual model (the most compelling, developed relationship is Laura and Jean's), it also opens a way - or gestures toward a way - to imagine bisexuality's broader, less confined possibilities, its multiplicities and frank instabilities. And this is what "Savage Nights" does best: it provokes rethinking of the "truths'' so many people take for granted, resists traditional categories of identity and morality, insists on the inadequacy of familiar social contracts. This is a crisis movie. It's important for that reason, for its analysis of the impossibility and absolute imperative of intimacy. It's also important because of its apparent flaws, its occasional resort to melodrama, its ongoing desire for structures that make sense, its existential heroics. Mostly, it's important for its inelegance, its lack of answers and "truth'' (despite the concluding sequence, which appears to grant some fairly regular closure). "Savage Nights" creates a language, imperfect, raging, and necessary. - Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Portrait of a Generation: Cyril Collard's Les Nuits fauves by Carolyn A. Durham LET ME BEGIN WITH the obvious. Cyril Collard is essentially the author of a single work, even if the work in question does exist in multiple forms. Collard, moreover, is dead, and his death occurred relatively early in the last decade of the twentieth century. Thus, when the work in question, in its final form, made history by simultaneously winning César awards for the best feature film and the best first film of 1992, Les Nuits fauves was already, and by definition, also destined to be both Collard's only feature film, as well as his best, and his last film, as well as his first. In this context, I don't doubt that it may well seem like une véritable gageure [a real challenge] not simply to ask any single film, and this one in particular; any single director, and this one in particular; but even any single body of work, given this one in particular, to serve as somehow representative of both French cinema and French society in the 1990s. Nor does it necessarily help that Les Nuits fauves is also openly autobiographical in inspiration, and that reality, always difficult in Collard's case to separate from fiction and film, became especially so once his death from AIDS at the age of 35 definitively turned the man into a myth and his life and career into a social and cultural phenomenon. This unusually close identification between the man and the work curiously complicates even further questions of textual significance and influence. Although the books and essays that appeared virtually overnight would surely not exist at all were it not for Les Nuits fauves, nonetheless much of that literature focuses on Collard himself rather than on his film. Indeed, from this perspective, the conjunction intended to link cinema and society in the preceding paragraph sometimes appears more disjunctive than connective; in the succinct phrase of one critic, "[Les Nuits fauves], ce n'est plus un film de cinéma. C'est un phénomène de société" (Guérand and Moriconi 203). Moreover, Collard's abrupt ascension to the stature of a mythic figure led some to characterize him as unique and exceptional‹to position him apart from, rather than a part of, a particular time and place. Still, a number of reviewers and critics, primarily French but, on occasion, American as well, have also explicitly identified either Collard, his audience, or his film with an entire generation. I quote a sample of such designations at random and clearly, for the moment, out of context: "la génération de l'angoisse" (Collard, Condamné amour), "la génération Collard" (Garcin), "le porte-parole de la génération Sida" (Durand-Souffland), "le film culte d'une génération Collard" (Liebowitz), "le témoin d'une génération (Sotinel)," "le Rimbaud des années Sida" (Delannoy 173), "un enfant du siècle dont la confession est devenue le brulôt emblématique des années quatre-vingt-dix" (Guérand and Moriconi 9), "un jeune homme du siècle" (Gravier), "the Collard generation" (Riding), "a powerfully accurate snapshot of the present historical moment" (Cheshire), and, to end with what might be considered a somewhat "official" version, in the words of former minister of culture Jack Lang: "toute une génération s'est reconnue dans le cinéma de Cyril Collard" (qtd. in Medioni 148). Moreover, Collard saw himself as the witness of his generation: "Il y a pour moi la même nécessité, que ce soit par la littérature ou le cinéma, d'essayer de témoigner de son temps" (qtd. in Guérand and Moriconi 160). What I find intriguing here is that the connection between Collard and a particular generation frequently takes the tautological form of "la génération Collard." Rather than speaking for or to some preconstituted group of individuals, already bound together by a common cultural or social attribute, as one would expect, Collard appears able, on the one hand, to bring a previously nonexistent generation into existence, in keeping with a very different meaning of the word generation, and, on the other hand, to constitute a generation unto himself. It is certainly true that Collard's own professional personality is fully consistent with the notion that a single individual might live a life suffi-ciently diverse to be in and of itself broadly representative. Although film is unquestionably the most collaborative of genres, Les Nuits fauves is, to a large extent, a one-man show in which Collard performs at once as novelist, screenwriter, songwriter, musician, director, and lead actor, just to limit myself to the roles in which he stars. More importantly, the film itself is similarly eclectic and excessive in form and quite deliberately so. Collard refers to his own work as an "objet bizarre," which he acknowledges "peut apparaître comme hétéroclite, hétérogène [vu de l'extérieur]," in keeping with what he describes as the "bulemic" character of Jean, Collard's alter ego and the hero of his film, who refuses to filter experience, to make any choice that might exclude other possibilities (Jousse and Toubiana). Thus, Les Nuits fauves overflows with a wealth of potentially incompatible material. Part commercial, part music video, part road movie, part realistic drama, part romantic fantasy, part comedy, part tragedy, part melodrama, part action/adventure film, part documentary, Collard's film constantly mixes genres and changes moods, and it does so at often breathtaking speed. This "esthétique coup de poing" (Toubiana 22) is further characterized by fast tracking, a highly mobile camera‹one which, in Collard's words, "gigote dans tous les sens" (Jousse and Toubiana 78)‹and aggressive, in-your-face closeups, suddenly juxtaposed to explicitly self-referential shots that distance the spectator from the very reality they simultaneously reflect and reproduce. In form alone, then, Les Nuits fauves is not only a product of the visual technology and the viewing habits of the late twentieth century, but it was predestined to be most readily accessible to that group of young spectators, ranging in age from approximately 15 to 25, who did indeed turn the film into a cult phenomenon. Compared to other generations, this "generation Collard" has been persistently characterized in the mass media (I am drawing here primarily upon a series of cover stories or special "dossiers" that appeared almost weekly in Le Nouvel Observateur throughout the 1990s) as follows: fragmented, eclectic, multicultural, more diverse, more tolerant, less cohesive, splintered, amorphous, cynical but optimistic; in short: elusive. In terms of media preferences, these viewers respond well to aggression, preferably visual, violent, and sexually explicit; they are wary of linear-plotted entertainments; and they prefer layered story lines that resist resolution (see, in particular, Righini). But if adolescents and young adults immediately warmed to Les Nuits fauves, the film's critical reception, in contrast, proved to be almost as varied, confused, and contradictory as the film itself was often perceived to be. Notably, Howard Feinstein describes Les Nuits fauves as "a slick if incoherent assortment of tracking shots, jump cuts, oblique angles, and other self-conscious formal footwork"; and Richard Corliss tries unsuccessfully to overlook a structure that he clearly finds equally disorienting: "O.K., these days narrative coherence is for wimps." To some extent, this is arguably a specifically American reaction, and I introduce it here primarily to establish a comparative context useful in cultural analysis. In the last decade, HIV has inspired a sufficient number of literary texts to have given rise in the United States to a parallel body of critical work, generally informed by the assumption that "art about AIDS tends to be raw" (Gaffney). As if the sheer destructive power and human tragedy of the disease itself resisted all attempts at aesthetic transformation, Emmanuel Nelson in AIDS: The Literary Response characteristically qualifies the issue of AIDS as "too real to be easily metaphorized or elegantly aestheticized". (1) Clearly, then, in this context, it would be the height of insensitivity even to address such texts‹produced by gay men, assumed to be autobiographical, and read as realistic‹in explicitly critical terms, let alone to go on to assess their relative aesthetic merits. (2) But Collard is not American; in France Les Nuits fauves is not a film about AIDS; and French audiences and certainly French critics, long accustomed to the aesthetic practices of "New Novelists," New Wave filmmakers, and postmodern theorists, no doubt have a somewhat greater appreciation for textual experimentation in and of itself. But, in that case, essentially the same problem may simply present itself in reverse to the extent that formal innovation and narrative structure come to be of interest independently of message and meaning. In France, it was the status of Les Nuits fauves as, in the words of Serge Toubiana, "sans conteste le film le plus dérangeant du cinéma français depuis longtemps". that put Collard on the cover of Les Cahiers du Cinéma twice within a single year. In her study of post-New Wave French cinema, Jill Forbes makes a key distinction between French and Anglo-American filmmakers, one clearly consistent with broader cultural and societal differences among France, England, and the United States, that is pertinent here. In contrast to the desire of British and American directors "to change the world rather than our ways of seeing the world," Forbes asserts that French filmmakers seek "not to change society but to change the cinema. . . . [T]heir impetus is always to film in a different way rather than to film different things". Although earlier incarnations of the enfant terrible, to whom Collard‹ "le Rimbaud des années Sida" (Delannoy 173), "the heir to Jean Genet" (James)‹has been compared, may once have appeared to abandon hope in the capacity of literature to change the world and to choose a lifestyle whose mythic dimensions would overshadow their work, their lasting heritage lies in the practice of a revolutionary poetics in which politics cannot finally be separated from the language in which it is expressed. By chance, Collard and Genet were born on the same day some fifty years apart, a coincidence that becomes something closer to a sense of destiny in Les Nuits fauves, whose hero shares Genet's first name. The news that Jean is HIV positive‹the announcement, that is, of his own death sentence‹is revealed to us at the precise moment that he learns that Genet has just died. The single sentence that Jean quotes at the time‹"Je pense à cette phrase de lui: 'La violence seule peut achever la brutalité des hommes'" [Only violence can bring an end to men's brutality] ‹announces and reflects both the subject and the style of Les Nuits fauves. Clearly, literary influence can play a significant role in illuminating the relationship between a text and its social and cultural context; it figures importantly in what one might call the "codes of contagion" that help to create and to define a national literature. Thus, although I could at this point use the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and John Cassavetes as a frame of reference, I want to propose that Genet, who made only a single film‹ Un Chant d'amour (1950)‹albeit one he both wrote and directed, nonetheless provides more appropriate access to Les Nuits fauves. (3) Collard's lifelong fascination with Genet included, in particular, a shared concern with the exploration of sexuality and the indictment of racism. Because we know that Collard read Edmund White's biography of Genet, let me cite White's succinct explanation of Genet's characteristic narrative strategies as they evolved from Journal du voleur, which Collard sought to adapt to the screen (Medioni 61), to the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux: "In Prisoner of Love, Genet's typical cinematic intercutting becomes rapid, constant, vertiginous‹a formal device for showing the correspondence between elements where no connections had been previously suspected.... In the novels of the 1940s the poet's urge to uncover correspondences is encoded in brilliant metaphors. Here metaphors have been replaced by a different method‹the tight sequencing of different subjects without transition." Collard uses techniques remarkably similar to those that White attributes to Genet's late prose to remarkably similar purposes. The language of Les Nuits fauves depends on such devices as rapid intercutting, associative editing, and transition by ellipsis and juxtaposition to develop an original strategy for the parallel exploration and understanding of two apparently unrelated, though equally significant, phenomena of contemporary French society: post-HIV sexuality and anti-Arab racism. The title of Les Nuits fauves immediately identifies a metaphoric system that not only functions internally to structure Collard's film but also connects its images to France's visual and cultural past. Fauvism most obviously recalls a movement in French painting that emerged around 1900 and briefly characterized the work of another group of enfants terribles, whose "wild animals" included such artists as Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck, and Matisse. (4) The paintings of the Fauves are marked by the bold use of vivid color, combined in formal patterns that often include violent juxtaposition. In Les Nuits fauves, Collard pays homage to these pictorial predecessors by filming a number of scenes in exaggerated shades of the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow. The official publicity poster for the film offers a particularly vivid example of the expressionistic combination of all three colors in alternating bands that stretch across a single canvas, leaving visible the broad brush strokes that created them. Within the film itself, shots of Jean's apartment most frequently show the three colors in juxtaposition, although they do, in fact, appear in many other settings, both interior and exterior, as well. The rapid intercutting and elliptical syntax of Collard's narrative style also recall the surprising contrasts and contradictions of color on a Fauve canvas. Metaphorically, fauvism also clearly evokes the powerfully sensory and sensual nature of Jean's nighttime sexual encounters. Although fauvism has traditionally been seen as primarily decorative, more recent accounts, such as those of James Herbert, have suggested that Fauve paintings actually engaged controversial social and political issues of their time, that "[they] made politics from culture". If the notion of a socially engaged art of unusual purity and directness, whose juxtaposition of bold color borders on the raw, makes us think, of course, of Les Nuits fauves, another contemporary work of art immediately, and surely appropriately, also comes to mind: one cannot help but picture the powerfully evocative AIDS quilt, "le Patchwork des noms." Given the structural innovations of Collard's work, on which I have insisted, any attempt at summary clearly requires that what might be identified as a primary plotline be artificially separated from the context in which it is embedded and then reconstructed as if it were an independent and coherent whole. In this sense alone, Les Nuits fauves tells the story of a bisexual cameraman who is HIV-positive with early symptoms of AIDS. On the one hand, Jean is caught between his relationship with Laura (Romane Bohringer), an 18-year-old woman whose love takes the form of jealousy and obsession, and his attraction to Samy (Carlos Lopez), the friend and sometime lover who is increasingly drawn to the violent racism of far-right politics. On the other hand, Jean is also addicted to "les nuits fauves" of the title, casual experiences of sadomasochistic sex that take place with anonymous men along the banks of the Seine. Because Les Nuits fauves is constructed as a "slice of life," Jean also travels, works, drives through Paris, dines with friends, visits his parents, takes drugs, goes to parties, and so on. To the extent, however, that dramatic conflict or narrative resolution come into play, Laura is the source of both. Her growing hysteria and a suicide attempt finally result in her forced hospitalization, during which her claim that she has been infected with HIV by Jean is proven false. Jean, however, will subsequently use the possibility of infection as a threat to save the life of an Arab youth surrounded by Samy's group of fascist skinheads. Up to this point nothing that I have said would necessarily distinguish between Collard's film and the 1989 novel on which it is based. Yet we know that Collard had considerable difficulty with this transposition and that he struggled, both while adapting the novel to the screen and while editing the final version of the film, to keep certain elements of the novel from disappearing (see Beaulieu; and Guérand and Moriconi 185ff). According to Philippe Delannoy, Collard's difficult search for a producer willing to back the film may have forced him to make some changes against his will and apart from any aesthetic motivation: "A la rigueur, le film pourrait se faire à la condition qu'il enlève la pisse, le Sida, les voyous, les fachos, les pédés, les beurs, le sexe, les capotes, la violence, la drogue, la poésie à la Jean Genet" (140). But if the film is indeed a somewhat more sanitized and certainly a far less complex version of the novel, Delannoy's description merely lists the raw materials that had to be streamlined without identifying the significant restructuring they underwent in the process. For there is a difference‹and de taille. If we are to believe Collard and his public, the screen adaptation of Les Nuits fauves results in nothing more nor less than yet another version of the romantic love story (see, for example, Medioni 95,136; and Guérand and Moriconi). Love stories, of course, can raise questions that may fairly be characterized as moral, at the very least, if not fully social or political. Although the behavior of Jean, who initially makes love to Laura without informing her that he is HIV-positive and then continues to have unprotected sex with her once she knows, tended to strike American audiences as dangerously irresponsible, French spectators were initially either more blasé or perhaps simply more romantic. Collard's young fans, his young female fans, in particular, found the implicit argument of Les Nuits fauves‹a late twentieth-century version of the belief that "true love conquers all," including the risk of contracting AIDS‹more appealing than appalling (see Liebowitz 4-9). Moreover, in the last interview he gave before his death, Collard openly endorses this view: "C'est d'ailleurs très romantique, cette lutte entre l'amour et la mort, Eros et Thanatos. Laura . . . pense que l'amour la préserve du danger, que rien ne peut lui arriver. Cet acte, c'est du romantisme pur et dur que les jeunes comprennent; c'est aussi un peu la passion folle de Chopin et de George Sand" (qtd. in Ettori 53). This last allusion is once again culturally specific; it draws upon a strongly French-inspired tradition of passionate love, whose codes Denis de Rougemont has traced back to Tristan et Iseult. The problem with this interpretation is that the film is not really about what Laura thinks or does. It is, in fact, Jean, and not Laura, whose transformation from novel to film is crucial to the reinterpretation of Les Nuits fauves as a heterosexual love story that brings redemption to a new variety of romantic hero. Jean's unexpected naïveté and return to innocence‹his "impression d'être comme un gamin"‹ directly conflicts with the younger Laura's explicitly sexual past and desire for a similar present. Jean wants to give Laura stuffed animals and extravagant birthday dinners, affectionate cuddling, and romantic kisses by the Seine; Laura wants to have sex. At the end of the film, moreover, it is Jean who proposes reconciliation and still harbors fantasies of traditional marriage and family. Thus, Jean's final words, although they certainly represent a highly ambivalent and curiously disembodied "I love you," encourage us to believe that Jean has finally learned to love. I want to emphasize, however, that this description, although accurate from a particular point of view, also seriously oversimplifies the complexity of Collard's film. Meaning is frequently delivered in Les Nuits fauves through, and as a result of, the editing process; it lies in the juxtposition of successive sequences. Thus Jean's most idyllic moments are ironically undermined even as they unfold. Laura and Jean's first romantic kiss on the banks of the Seine contrasts with the subsequent passage in which Jean and Samy pick up and attempt to share sexually a girl whom they meet in the streets. A passionate lovemaking scene on the quais of the Seine is arguably already contaminated by an excessively sentimental cut from the very conventional couples who are dancing on a bateau mouche, but, in addition, an experience that Laura explicitly characterizes as unique to her heterosexual affair with Jean in fact takes place at the very site of his "nuits fauves." Jean's final bout with sentiment occurs as he says goodbye to Laura, who is holding a little boy in her arms: "Je regarde ce bambin blond dans les bras de Laura et je me dis que c'est vraiment notre enfant. Comment a-t-on pu faire un enfant aussi blond?" This insistance on the child's unusual fairness of coloring seems tragically ironic, in retrospect; in the following sequence of the film, neo-Nazi thugs violently attack a nonwhite victim because of his racial "impurity." The explanation for the kinder and gentler hero of the film can no doubt be found in the confluence of a number of factors, including, as I have suggested, the purely pragmatic and apparently extending to the purely personal: Collard himself attributed the evolution in his fictional counterpart to the simple fact that he had fallen in love with Corine Blue during the filming of Les Nuits fauves (Ettori). But love also sells mainstream movies, and not only those that are produced in Hollywood. In Lucy Fischer's words, "It is a truism of the commercial cinema that the subject of love is central to the standard plot mechanism. Whether the genre is western, musical, crime film, or comedy, the fulcrum of the drama typically rests on heterosexual romance". If Fischer and other feminist film critics have been primarily concerned with how this romantic plot structure entraps women in dramas that also privilege the individual hero, psychological interpretation, and the private sphere, much remains to be learned about how love functions in films that engage a specific sociocultural context and demand a political or ideological reading. From this perspective, the use of the narrative of romance as a metaphor for colonialism in a number of French films, most of which date from the same decade as Les Nuits fauves, offers an intriguing parallel to the intersections of romance and racism in Collard's film.(5) Autobiographical works by contemporary women filmmakers (e.g., Claire Denis, Brigitte Roüan), whose sex no doubt provides the same access as does Collard's sexuality to the ambivalent positioning of the outsider, tend, in particular, to adopt a critical perspective in which the narrative of romance, apparently foregrounded as in Les Nuits fauves, ironically serves simultaneously to undermine the discourse of colonialism. Although I do not agree with those reviewers who argue that the primacy granted to heterosexual romance in Les Nuits fauves allows the film to be interpreted as homophobic (see Feinstein), it does serve to foreground Jean's bisexuality. The importance of this image of mediation, or rather, intermediacy, as a social and political metaphor is reinforced by the presence, original to the film, of the travelo who sings Edith Piaf love songs in a bar frequented at one and the same time by gays, transvestites, skinheads, and beurs. This ambiguous figure functions, as does Jean's own sexual ambivalence, as and at the locus where the discourses of le sida and la xénophobie meet to intersect and, most often, to clash. Although Jean will commit himself to a specifically political action at the end of the film, an event to which I will return in a moment, Les Nuits fauves is predominantly a film of its times. France in the 1990s was a country marked by a vaguely defined but highly persistent sense of malaise, which has only very recently begun to dissipate; it was a nation in transit, constantly changing, often in spite of itself, and without any clear sense of where it was headed nor of what it would have become when it had arrived. Appropriately, then, among the most characteristic visual images in Collard's film are those of passageways, tunnels, corridors. Beginning with the mysterious cave in Morocco with which the film opens and including the shadowy quais along the Seine by night, the tunnels through which Jean's car speeds, and the innumerable hallways of its Paris settings, Les Nuits fauves conveys the sense of a world of endless possibilities but devoid of any sense of direction. A more important concern is that the foregrounding of heterosexual romance in the film version of Les Nuits fauves may displace the thematic centrality of anti-Arab racism. Certainly this would be consistent with the interests of Collard's primary audience. In a 1993 Sofres poll, the number one concern of 600 young people between 18 and 24 was "la prévention du sida" with a 79% support rate. Only 40% perceived "la lutte contre le racisme" to be of primary importance and only an astonishing 18% cited "l'intégration des immigrés" (Righini). For Collard, too, clearly the prevention of AIDS is of crucial interest, but it serves at the same time as a strategy to denounce racial violence. (6) Jean's illness and its treatment lead to a series of physiological changes in his body; the most important of these is the appearance of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer of the skin whose very visibility serves to link homosexuality, AIDS, and racial difference. Jean's use of his own "bad blood" as a weapon to avenge an attack on someone of color similarly equates racism with a fatal and infectious disease. Thomas Sotinel is one of the few critics to have made this connection explicit in his review of Les Nuits fauves, which he describes as follows: "à la fois autoportrait d'un jeune homme brillant et condamné et portrait d'une société malade. Du sida, bien sûr, mais aussi du racisme, de la précarité, de la violence, de la corruption" (See also Cheshire). Collard, in contrast, might appear to make the same error as most other reviewers in substituting a relationship of opposition between AIDS and racist ideology for one of similarity: "C'est un peu gros comme symbolisme, le sida contre le fascisme" (Jousse and Toubiana). But in fact, there is nothing remotely "gros," nothing obvious or unsubtle about the analogy, given the moral ambiguity that characterizes the film and which Collard expresses elsewhere by drawing on specifically racial imagery: "Les Nuits fauves sont nés de l'idée d'assembler deux contraires, le sombre et le solaire. Je voulais insister sur deux ou trois choses. Exprimer que rien n'est jamais noir ou blanc mais noir et blanc" (qtd. in Madden 88). Thus Jean has far too much in common with Samy for his revolt against the virus poisoning his body to be significantly more convincing than Samy's own search for purification through the blood rituals of the so called "alchemists." "Virus" is, of course, also a common metaphor for the evil of racism (Sontag). Samy's initiation into the alchemy of fascism begins with the same rituals of violent, sadomasochistic sex that Jean seeks out nightly. Not least of all, by having unprotected sex with Laura, Collard's hero is already a potential killer long before he conceives of using his own blood as a weapon. In this context, too, le fauvisme functions to establish an important network of associations. In the lighting of Les Nuits fauves, Collard privileges the ambiance of the clair-obscur, whose dialogue of light and shadow reflects the moral ambiguity of his film. Thus, the explicitly cinematic term, le chien-loup, serves as a mise-en-abyme [= a particular element referring to the whole] within the film ; the term recurs both to identify the moment of temporal ambivalence that separates day from night at either sunset or dawn and to recall the metaphoric dilemma to which the expression owes its name. If the confusion between the "tame" and the "wild" refers to the men whose "savage" sexual behavior awakens Jean's desire, it also has clear racial connotations, as emphasized by the fact that black and white footage is juxtaposed to color when the term is first introduced. The true "fauves" in the film are the skinheads whose racial hatred literally transforms them into wild beasts who prey on their victims in horribly savage ways (e.g., they propose to cut off an Arab youth's genitals and stuff them in his mouth). Finally, I want to note the important function, both thematic and formal, that the sound track serves in the film and to cite several examples of its rich evocative power that are directly pertinent here. Although sound and music may well be "crucial for spectatorial identification" in all films, as Shohat and Stam have recently reminded us (209), the popular music that accompanies Les Nuits fauves could clearly be assumed to have special appeal for Collard's youthful audience. This expectation is heightened for an MTV generation by the fact that the songs, written and often sung by Collard himself, are in either French or English and often in both languages at once. Although the CD sold extremely well on its own, Collard's songs are also foregrounded within the film, where they substitute for dialogue or voice-over and serve as key transitional devices at times of rapid on-screen visual movement. Indeed, the very title of the film and its significance are embedded in the English-language "Paradise": Living hard, leaving fast, Wild senses all alive, You'll come and then dive Into the savage nights. Collard has noted his preference for "un fonctionnement émotionnel et impressioniste de la musique" in describing the film's score in language that clearly echoes the visual effects of fauvism: Les chansons viennent comme des taches de couleur se glisser entre les scenes de dialogue. Elles sont comme un autre language.... Je voulais une grande diversité, une sorte de patchwork musical.... La musique participe dans le film à l'idée de la multiplicité des images et des sons qui caracérisent notre époque, à l'abolition des frontières géographiques, affectives, sexuelles. (CD jacket) "La Rage," [ = the rabies] written and sung by Collard, accompanies the opening credits of the film and precedes any visual images. The word rage, introduced in a context of uncertainty and interrogation ("Qui peut dire exactement / Qu'il sait ce qu'est la rage"), successively evokes not only both violent anger and intense passion but an infectious and fatal illness that can transform human beings into savage animals; it is, in short, a microcosm of the metaphoric structure of the film as a whole.(7) It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this bilingual song also includes what would appear to be a direct reference to Collard's self-identification with Jean Genet: Chercher au-delà du mal Et bien avant la morale Se réveiller soldat D'une armée de forcats. (8) The very roughness of Les Nuits fauves‹its unfiltered diversity, its elliptical transitions, its multiple and sometimes contradictory allusions, its lack of narrative coherence‹is what allows Collard to suggest connections that may not normally occur to us‹indeed, that we may even actively resist seeing. Yet, such connections are also fundamental to any understanding of a contemporary French reality that will be characteized, of necessity, by "contamination," that is, made "impure" by contact with others. In the words of Frédéric Strauss, Les Nuits fauves constitutes "une communication forcément impure, faite d'images hétéroclites, de mots composites . . . et forcément cacaphonique, avivant la nécessité de redonner une place à l'Autre." It is precisely this refusal to integrate the disparate, to erase difference, and to deny conflict that allows Collard to speak beyond his own experience, to reflect a generation and a decade. Moreover, the specific situation of victims of AIDS can increasingly be linked to the final sequence of Les Nuits fauves, in which Jean proclaims his passion for life even in the face of, in his case, almost certain death: "Je suis vivant.... Je vais peut-être mourir du sida. Mais ce n'est plus ma vie. Je suis dans la vie." In the most recent article to date devoted to Collard, Rollet and Williams cite this focus on life as what distinguishes his work from that of other gay filmmakers of the same period: "Collard offers his French audience the first‹and possibly only‹optimistic HIV-positive character".(9) But in France, as we know, Collard neither wished to be nor was either interpreted or remembered as a director of specifically gay films. Although his untimely death separates Les Nuits fauves from a new generation of young French filmmakers whose work has led to their inclusion of late in a "nouvelle nouvelle vague," he can rightfully claim a place as a precursor to what is also being called a cinema "à la première personne" (see, for example, Lopate). Collard provides one model for Cassavetes-inspired camera work (e.g. hand-held camera, improvisation, jump cuts) and political engagement which speaks out, notably, against the racism of contemporary French society. Cyril Collard, had he lived, would certainly have been among the 59 French filmmakers who in February 1997 spoke out publicly, and not just through their films, against the unfair immigration laws of Debré and Pasqua (see Herzberg). Even as AIDS-related deaths have declined, racism unfortunately appears to be ever more resilient. The fact that 18% of those under 25 voted for Le Pen in 1997, an eight-point increase over 1988 and three percentage points above the national average (Beckmann), reminds us of the ongoing urgency of what Collard believed to be the other crucial challenge facing the young spectators who transformed Les Nuits fauves into a portrait of their geneneration. Notes 1. See also Kruger; Murphey and Poirier. 2. The context in France, where Hervé Guibert and Guy Hocquenghem are among the best known of contemporary gay "writers of AIDS" and receive serious literary attention, would appear to be quite different. 3. Characteristics of Pasolini's work shared by Collard include the structural use of metaphor and analogy, grounded in concealed connections; hybridity; paradox; an interest in the sacred; and discontinuous editing. Characteristics of Cassavetes that recall Collard's filmmaking include a present-tense cinema of the "surface"; apparent chaos; in-your-face filmmaking; perpetual motion; fluid notion of the self; and raw data left visible (See also Toubiana). Cf. Maurice Pialat. 4. The designation les Fauves is attributed to a reference to "the wild beasts" made by art critic Louis Vauxcelles upon entering a room with paintings by Vlaminck, Derain, Macquet, Puy, Roualt, and Matisse at the 1905 Salon d'automne. 5. e.g., Claire Denis's Chocolat (1989), Brigitte Roüan's Outremer (1990), Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1992), Regis Wargnier's Indochine (1992). 6. The extensive network of allusions to France's colonialist past in North Africa, which in Collard's novel accompanies and enriches the critique of contemporary racism directed against French immigrants and citizens of Arab descent, has largely disappeared from the film version of Les Nuits fauves. Still, at the very moment when Laura enters a clinic to be tested for AIDS, we learn that her mother grew up in French colonialist Algeria. 7. In her important discussion of "AIDS and its metaphors," Susan Sontag recalls the rabies phobia of nineteenth-century France, in which fear focused less on the disease as lethal than as literally dehumanizing. Collective fantasy held that infection transformed people into maddened animals and unleashed uncontrollable sexual impulses (38-39). More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen has used the reassuring Western belief that an AIDS epidemic originated in‹and has been since confined to‹Africa as part of the National Front's xenophobic propaganda. 8. In "L'Oiseau noir," Collard similarly associates himself with Rimbaud: Un grand oiseau noir Qui a perdu la mémoire Et qui s'entête à vivre Derrière les bateaux ivres. 9. In a recent interview in the Nouvel Observateur (Armanet), the singer Mano Solo, in some ways Collard's successor among French youth, notes that even as "le fléau continue" in the third world, and especially in Africa, the future of those who are HIV positive in developed countries has dramatically altered: "Ceux condamnés à mourir doivent se réhabituer à vivre." © The French Review, Feb. 2002 Questions: (to be handed in as last written assignment) 1. Where, from the start, is contained the English title of the film with its significance? 2. In the French title the word "fauves" is chosen for a specific reason: What is the link between the fauvist painters and Collard's film? Who, according to Carolyn Durham, are the true "fauves" of the film? 3. "Meaning, states Durham, is frequently delivered in Les Nuits fauves through, and as a result of, the editing process; it lies in the juxtposition of successive sequences." Can you illustrate her comment with two examples? 4. As remarked by Rollet and Williams, in what ways does Cyril Collard offer in Les Nuits fauves "the first‹and possibly only‹optimistic HIV-positive character"? 5. Would you recommend such a film to your friends? Whether positive or negative, for what reasons? ---------------------------------------------- 14 bis The Dream Life of Angels - La vie rêvée des anges, 1998. A film by Erick Zonka Synopsis In Lille, two penniless young women with few prospects become friends. Isa moves in with Marie, who's flat-sitting for a mother and child in hospital in comas following a car crash. Isa is out-going, unskilled, with hopes of moving south to warmer climes. Marie usually is either angry or detached. Then, while Isa begins to visit the child in whose flat they live, going to hospital to read to her, Marie slowly falls for a rich youth. At first Marie keeps him at bay, then she not only pursues him, she begins to dream he is her life's love. When Isa tries to warn Marie, their friendship flounders. How will Marie handle the inevitable? And once they lose the flat, where will they go? -- ou, en français: Isa, vingt ans et un sac à dos, débarque à Lille. Isa cherche des petits boulots, jamais les mêmes, et jamais très longtemps. Son chemin croise celui de Marie, solitaire aussi, mais sauvage, révoltée contre sa condition sociale. Elles rencontrent deux motards sympa, et Chriss, qui vient d'un autre milieu et fait rêver Marie au delà du supportable. C'est à partir de ces deux rencontres, de ces deux personnages de femme que j'ai bâti mon histoire. Il m'a fallu deux ans pour l'écrire et pour la faire évoluer d'un projet initial de quatre heures à ce qu'est le film aujourd'hui. Mon approche de l'écriture est avant tout visuelle. Le point de départ de mes scénarios est toujours l'imagination. Toute démarche didactique m'est étrangère. Je ne pars ni d'un thème ni d'un point de vue théorique, mais je me laisse guider par mon seul imaginaire. L'introduction du sens et de la cohérence est une démarche qui intervient après un travail que j'aborde à la sauvage. - Erick Zonca, Dossier de presse du film, Cannes 1998. La vie rêvée des anges n'est pas un film de lutte des classes, mais c'est un film où les classes existent, et où l'opposition des classes a à voir avec la mort de Marie, séduite et trahie par un fils à papa lisse et froid. (...) Le titre du film intrigue. Qui rêve ? Qui sont les anges ? C'est comme un halo de mystère qui flotte autour de l'histoire simple de Marie, d'Isa, de Sabine et des nounours, d'autant plus qu'Erick Zonca semble récuser toute lecture spiritualiste de son film. Si La vie rêvée est beaucoup plus qu'une tranche de vie (de vies), c'est affaire de cinéma. Moins liée au scénario (Zonca raconte qu'il a tourné de nombreuses scènes qu'il n'a pas gardées au montage, ce qui semble indiquer que le scénario définitif n'est apparu qu'après le tournage, au contact des images réalisées) qu'à la mise en scène serrée de Zonca et au travail conjugué des deux comédiennes et de la responsable des images, Agnès Godard. -Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Politis, 17 septembre 1998 Reviews It's a French film. A very good French film. A very French French film. And, to boot, a first feature by a Frenchman, then 42, with a rather unusual name that more often than not misspelled: Eric, Erik, Erick, Zonka, Zoncka, Zonca. His background is unusual too. Born in Orleans in 1956, while still in high-school he decided to become a filmmaker. He moved to Paris at age 16, discovered American cinema, took acting lessons, survived via odd jobs. At age 20 he moved to New York, spent three years there, survived via odd jobs, married a dancer from the Merce Cunningham Company, took more acting classes, discovered European (including, very much, French classical cinema). Back to Paris for two years' study of philosophy and more odd jobs. At age 30 he entered movies as an apprentice. He then became an assistant, later directed TV documentaries and, beginning in 1992, three short films, all successful on the festival circuit. But glory seldom comes from shorts. It arrived with a bang when Dreamlife and its makers received a slew of nominations at the 1998 Cannes Festival, where its two protagonists shared the Best Actress prize. Ms Bouchez, a veteran of many films, is in increasing demand, and was in another, very good film at Cannes, also a first feature called Louise (Take 2). Ms Regnier is a newcomer. At the 1999 Cesar awards (French Oscars), the movie was Best French Film, Elodie Bouchez Best Actress, Natacha Regnier Most Promising Actress. At the European Film Awards, Mr. Zonca won as European Discovery of the Year, the two ladies as Best Actresses. At the Viennale, the movie was The International Critics Association's choice. Dreamlife has no plot by Hollywood standards. A penniless drifter, the rather petite 21-year old Isa (for Isabelle), carrying all her possessions in a huge backpack, wanders into the industrial city of Lille in Northern France. She hopes to stay with a male friend, finds out he's left town, somehow spends a cold night in Lille (there are tiny clues that it is the post- Christmas season). Her attempt to pick up some francs by making postcards from magazine pictures leads to a casual encounter (a marvelous Yugoslav who has a daughter her age) who finds her a sewing job in a minimum wage clothing factory. Isa's skills being zero, she gets quickly fired, but not before meeting a co-worker, Marie, also 21. Hesitantly, Marie puts up Isa in "her" good apartment, one that she is minding for a mother and a daughter who, after a car crash, are comatose in a hospital. By degrees, Isa and Marie form a friendship--in fact more camaraderie than affection-- though having impecunity in common are otherwise different from each other. Isa, who flashes generously her big, dark eyes and a sunny, toothy smile (Ms Bouchez's trademark), is adaptable and comfortable with her ambulatory life. We learn only little about her past. A scar over an eyebrow (apparently put there at Bouchez's suggestion) keeps catching our eye and making us wonder how it got there? Violence against Isa? A tomboy accident? Pretty unsinkable and optimistic, she recalls a bit Godard's My Life to Live, in which Nana (Anna Karina), forced to survive through prostitution, still thinks that life can be beautiful. But unlike Godard, Erick Zonca will not analyze, philosophize, expatiate or ask the incessant questions that hallmark Godard's work. Dreamlife is entirely "what you see is what you get." There's also a strong, loving streak in Isa. She discovers and reads, in the apartment, the diary of Sabine, the daughter. Next thing you know, she is visiting regularly the vegetable-like Sabine at the hospital (the mother had died) where she speaks to her as if in the belief that this will help her get well. It's a wonderfully touching invention . At the other extreme, slender, taller Marie is are rebel with a huge, misanthropic chip on her shoulder. (It is later explained partly by her background, partly as the not unusual dissatisfaction among the French working class). Isa, strictly from hunger yet laughingly takes on the very temp job of dressing ridiculously (in the cold street), putting on roller-skates and advertising sandwich-boards. Marie, however will not. She is not amused. She thinks, correctly but impractically, that this is demeaning work. She is always very conscious of the humiliations of life. Yet she's also capable of fun and games. Trying to crash ticketless a rock-concert, the girls are blocked by two tough-looking bouncers (and bikers), thin Fredo and corpulent Charly. What starts as antagonism ends up as sweet friendship, which extends to Marie sleeping--but not having an affair --with Charly. She's keeping her options open. The main option comes in the person of Chriss (sic), a young man who is what the French call "papa's son," a spoiled fellow whose family has bought him a night-club (the very one where the bouncers work) and more. What really matters here is that Chriss is a cad. When Marie is caught shoplifting, he rescues her. In spite of her hostility extending also to him, she yields, goes to bed with Chriss, begins a short-lived but calamitous relationship which is punctuated by very real humiliations, which is never explained, in which stages of abandon alternate with stages of clenched teeth. One thing is fairly clear: that Marie herself does not know what she feels except that the wealthy man will be her ticket out of misery. How naive. The Chriss business puts a wedge between the girls. Isa, who at first seemed to be a lightweight in the brains department, proves to be realistic, perspicacious and anxious to open Marie's eyes to her self-destruction. It all falls on deaf, hostile ears... The movie is beautifully made in all respects, and with a strong sense of economy of means. Photography is done smoothly with super-16 cameras which allow for flexibility, the following of characters, and a near-documentary look. Style, script, editing, acting, real sets too are under the sign of economy as well as palpable intimacy in the collaboration of all involved. The film is not manufactured, instead, it records life. It also bucks the contemporary trend of movies begetting movies, of the past- movies-awareness that was the gift to us by the French New Wave but went on to become mere fashion (viz. Tarantino and hordes of Sundance-ish films). Here movie-consciousness does not replace life-consciousness. There are no riffs on past pictures. Yet Dreamlife is eminently French. For one thing, it is character and relationship oriented. For another, it deals with the working class, which diversely gets labeled as proletarian, blue-collar or low-class. The paradox (a staple of French cinema), is that the rich, petty bourgeois Chriss is in reality very low-class ethically. Clearly too, the classic French cinema that Mr. Zonca paradoxically discovered in New York, has marked him. He updates the "poetic realism" of (mostly) the 1930s with its stream of "Popular Front" movies that celebrated loners among the common men and women, that had their own streak of "miserabilism," and that never quite came to a halt. Witness some of Robert Bresson's works and, even closer to our day, Agnès Varda's Odyssey of a female drifter in Vagabond (1985). " Le mauvais goût mène au crime" (Stendhal) - Edwin Jahiel (Edwin Jahiel's movie reviews are at http://www.prairienet.org/ejahiel) Another Review La vie rêvée des anges est un film important qui dépeint la vie de deux jeunes Françaises d¹origine modeste luttant contre quelque chose de plus grand qu¹elles-mêmes, les passions, la hiérarchie sociale et économique, le passé, dans l¹Europe post-industrielle, moderne. Représentant la France aux Oscars de 1998, La vie rêvée des anges est une oeuvre dramatique portée par la force de deux comédiennes et deux personnages ? Elodie Bouchez (Isa) et Natacha Régnier (Marie) ? qui furent justement récompensées par un double prix d¹interprétation féminine au 51ème festival de Cannes. Situé à Lille à la fin des années 90 et raconté d¹une manière linéaire, le film possède une structure assez rigoureuse qui relève d¹une série de contrastes et de substitutions. Optimiste, brune et nomade, vivant de petits boulots et voyageant avec son sac à dos, Isa suscite des souvenirs cinématographiques, du moins dans les premièes séquences, en rappelant le personnage errant de Mona dans Sans toit ni loi de Varda (Agnès Varda est, notons-le, celle qui est en charge de la photographie dans La vie rêvée des anges). Par contre, plutôt mal dans sa peau, Marie fait contraste avec sa camarade. Critique et arrêtée dans ses opinions, sujette aux excès de colère et gouvernée par des désirs qu¹elle ne parvient pas à articuler, elle habite depuis toujours Lille et sa banlieue. Amies de hasard, toutes les deux cherchent,souvent à leur insu, à vivre et réaliser des rêves. Pour Isa, il s¹agit de réussir sa vie sentimentale immédiate, de créer un peu d¹harmonie autour d¹elle en vivant au jour lejour sans jamais couper les ponts avec le passé. Pour Marie, quoiqu¹elle ne le dise pas explicitement, il s¹agit de ³s¹en sortir², de quitter la vie de pénurie médiocre qu¹elle a toujours connue et ce, au moyen d¹une liaison avec Chriss, un riche garçon bourgeois qui, au fond, la méprise. On la sent vivement marquée par une profonde mais tacite humiliation sociale qui, contracditoirement, la pousse à rechercher ce qui lui fait mal et la répugne. C¹est justement une des réussites dans le jeu de Régnier et dans le tournage de Zonca que de voir cette attraction-répulsion dans la gestuelle de Marie: elle communique dans les mouvements de son corps tout ce qui ne se dit que trop tard dans le film. Zonca organise et enrichit son oeuvre avec quelques relations de substitution et de répétition. Isa et Marie squattent chez une dame bourgeoise et sa fille toutes les deux dans le coma à l¹hôpital, victimes d¹un accident d¹auto. Parasitaires, elles s¹accaparent visiblement des traits des deux absentes. Isa, enfantine, lit et reprend le journal intime de la fillette alors que Marie met des robes de la mère et cherche un bonheur impossible avec un type qui n¹est pas de son rang social. Le rêve de s¹en sortir se dissiple brutalement à la fin du film où, au lieu d¹une ascension vers les anges il y a une chute vers le bas. La mère est morte à l¹hôpital et Marie - plaquée par Chriss, se suicide en se laissant tomber plus qu¹elle ne se jette d¹une fenêtre. Isa, qui a débuté dans une fabrique de couture, finit, dans la dernière séquence du film, par travailler à la chaîne dans une fabrique aseptisée d¹ordinateurs. Zonca semble nous dire que l¹histoire semble prête à se répéter avec les mêmes personnages: il s¹agirait tout simplememt de changer de décor en modernisant un peu. Ainsi, dans La vie rêvée des anges, Zonca fait une critique sociale sévère à la manière du Truffaut des 400 coups, c¹est-à-dire, il évite le didactisme en faisant appel à une identification forte avec la vie et le sort de jeunes personnages séduisants pris dans un ensemble qui les dépasse. Il en résulte une oeuvre cinématographique d¹une rare qualité. - The French Review ---------------------------------------------- Tatie Danielle, a film by Etienne Chatiliez Auntie Danielle is an elderly widow living in the provincial town of Auxerre. She is mean and tyrannical towards her aged maid Odile, and she heartily dislikes her relatives (great-nephew Jean-Pierre Billard, his wife Catherine and their two sons, Jean-Christophe and Jean-Marie, as well as Jean-Pierre's sister Jeanne). She confides her thoughts aloud to a portrait of her deceased husband Edouard. When Odile dies from a fall for which Danielle is partly responsible, the latter goes to live with her family in Paris. The Billards' patience is sorely tried by life with Danielle, who hates the food they give her, is bored by the outings they organize, scoffs at gifts and wilfully loses their younger son in a park. The war of attrition escalates: Danielle makes herself sick on purpose and wets her nightgown in the presence of the Billards' dinner party guests. When the Billard family goes on holiday to Greece, a home help, Sandrine, is hired to look after the old woman. Danielle tries to bully Sandrine into submission, but soon discovers that her tactics do not work. Sandrine and Danielle strike up a friendship of sorts, though Danielle refuses Sandrine's request for a night off Sandrine goes out all the same and, out of spite, Danielle wrecks the apartment, smears herself with filth, eats dog food and sets the place on fire. Rescued, she becomes an overnight celebrity, while her relatives (still in Greece) are branded on TV and by the neighbours as uncaring monsters. After the scandal dies down, Danielle is sent to an old peopleís home, where she tyrannizes other female inmates. One Sunday, however, she vanishes; she and Sandrine are discovered having a great time at a skiing resort. In the late 60s, Simone de Beauvoir wrote: "Old age is a problem on which all the failures of society converge. And this is why it is so carefully hidden." Times are changing, it seems, when a 1990 mainstream French comedy can tackle old age head-on via a cantankerous eighty-two-year-old heroine who behaves spectacularly badly. Tatie Danielle is the second feature by Etienne Chatiliez, the director of the hugely successful "La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille" (Life Is a Long Quiet River). This is not the quaint and romantic France so beloved of the British: people eat frozen convenience-foods, watch American soaps dubbed into French, read Barbara Cartland, and go on holiday in a Club-Med-type village in Greece complete with "reconstructed Cretan chapel". Yet for French audiences, Tatie Danielle hits many familiar sore spots, such as the legendary meanness of he French provincial bourgeoisie and their obsession with inheritance, explored in literature since Balzac. The hypochondria of a medicine-obsessed, doctor-worshipping nation ("You know the doctor says no sugar") is touched on, as are racist habits like training dogs to attack black postmen. Most sensitive of all, the film tackles the issue of how an increasingly aging population is to be dealt with, given the vicissitudes of hectic urban life: in other words, what is to be done with inconvenient grannies (and dogs). The dog is disposed of in classic Parisian fashion by being left by the roadside. As for the granny, her destiny appears to be the old people's home with its horror stories of emotional deprivation and out of control bodily functions. This bleak and unflattering picture is unusual in French comedies, which have by and large invoked the nostalgic and the cute rather than the grotesque (as in the work of Jacques Tati, for example, or recent films like "Trois hommes et un couffin" (Three Men and a Cradle) and "Romuald et Juliette". Etienne Chatiliez, however, touches on aspects of social reality most of us would rather not see on the screen, while still being extremely funny. This comedy - for instance, in the moment when Sandrine slaps Danielle, and in the scenes in the old people's home - has affinities with the post-68 vitriolic humour of cartoonists like Reiser, who drew memorably mean OAPs [Old-Age Pensioner] and alcoholic wrecks. And yet, in the end, cuteness resurfaces, in the fantasy ending, for instance, or in the occasional transformation of Danielle from vile 'bitch' to the naughty girl who eats too many cream cakes and makes faces behindpeople's backs. More fundamentally, Chatiliez's decision to extend the film's derision to all the characters, leaving no positive point of identification - except possibly the working-class Sandrine - defuses the impact of his satire. It is also unfortunate that the mockery, often very precise and sociological, as with the Billards' petty bourgeois tastes (their clothes, their passion for trendy cuisine, their language), has its reactionary side in, for instance, the treatment of the older son's homosexuality. Ultimately, the film cannot decide whether Danielle is an ungrateful virago, the bane of a well-meaning (if silly) family, or a subversive vieille dame indigne, an unruly older woman who flies in the face of convention. The ending, in which Danielle is rescued from the old people's home by Sandrine. seems to favour the latter interpretation, but the rest of the film does not really support this. There is little explanation offered as to why an old woman should behave in such a manner, even though this is a film scripted by a woman and almost entirely played out between women, in which men are either dead (Danielle's husband) or absent from the screen. Catherine is seen at work in her beauty parlour (where she specializes in hair removal), for example, but her husband is not. It is the women who discuss, and ackle, the problem of caring for the elderly. There are hints that sexual frustration, alluded to in the words of the song heard over the titles, the "Ballad of an Old Bitch" and echoed in her passion for Barbara Cartland novels and TV soaps, may be one cause for Danielle's behaviour. In the old people's home near the end, the image of Danielle gazing out of he window for hours chimes with earlier shots of her peering from behind her curtains at the outside world, evoking a wasted life of appalling emotional isolation. Despite its upbeat ending, this dark quality casts enough of a shadow to make Tatie Danielle bitter rather than sweet. - Ginette Vincendeau Some Questions: 1. Tatie Danielle, ³a mean and intelligent film.² This is probably why some people hate it and others find it quite entertaining. Where does your preference go? Explain. 2. Chatiliez's satire extends to all the characters, except one. Which one? For what reason perhaps? 3. The best part of the film undoutedly is Chatiliez¹s astute observations on French society and the average French family. What are some of the observations that you can contrast with what you experience in our American society? ----------------------------------------------